Copasetic Flow

 TouCans Veritical activated the Pony Express Trail from Pier 7! Here's the map. Blue markers are QSOs. Yellow markers are RBN spots. Colors indicate relative signal strength using the resistor color scale, (violet is second biggest, black is lowest.) Once again, the rig reached Alaska from downtown San Francisco. In it's usual thumbing-its-nose at conventiatonal wisdom way, the path to Alaska, (the orange line in the map detail below), from the location of the antenna is straight down the metal railing the antenna was mounted in Here's the antenna setup QSOs Callsign rx RST tx RST Time (GMT) Frequency kj7dt 559 579 2024/11/06 21:48:00 14057.4 wx7or 559 559 2024/11/06 21:56:00 14057.4 k0yo 449 559 2024/11/06 22:10:00 14057.4 k5ohy 229 559 2024/11/06 22:18:00 14057.4 kc4cr 229 559 2024/11/06 22:25:00 14057.4 al7kc 449 539 2024/11/06 22:27:00 14057.4 k7esq 559 599 2024/11/06 22:30:00 14057.4 ak6fq 539 459 2024/11/06 22:43:00 14057.4 ve7atj 339 559 2024/11/0...

 Heartened by the vertical antenna results at  San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park US-0757, I headed out to a pier in San Francisco near the Pony Express Trail, US-4578. Project TouCans did not disappoint, and I made one eyeball QSO in addition to the 7, (yeah, I didn't quite make the activation before the keyer's batteries ran out), QSOs I meade on the pier. Here's a map of the QSOs and Reverse Beacon spots. Blue markers denote QSOs while yellow markers denote RBN spots. The color scale indicates signal strength using resistor value color coding. I find it really interesting that the rig made it up to Alaska again! The other interesting point about this activation attempt is the location. I took the MUNI F to the Washington Street stop and then walked just a bit north to Pier 7 Here's what the rig and antenna setup looked like. The antenna is one half of TouCans' ordinary dipole taped to what's supposed to be a carbon fiber rod, (it doesn't seem...