Copasetic Flow

 In addition to some interesting ham radio happenings, there were fighter jets and hummingbirds. Stand-alone cameras rock! Park: Mt. Davidson in San Francisco:  W6/NC-423 I used the best-for-me-for-early-morning-transit route I mentioned in my last SOTA report  for this summit. I also used my Google Pixel phone to record the actual slope of the hike up from the bus stop. You might remember that I took umbrage that Google claimed the route was almost flat.  Today, I measured it using the 'degrees off kilter' display on my cell phone. The slope is a wopping 12 degrees. Hardly flat. Here's what the world looks like if you take a picture of the 'mostly flat' sidewalk: Radio Details and Gear: I saw that the  qrper.com  trip reports include a gear list. I hadn't ever thought about it before, so I figured I try it out. Interesting, or no? Radio: A green board Rockmite 20. You can get the red board kit at  QRPMe . Antenna: 12 gauge wire cut to a half-wave dipo...

I learned about atlatls and their application to ham radio today. First, they're not to be confused with  Axolotl , one of the Characters from catscafe : An atlatl is a spear thrower according to Wikipedia. I vaguely remembered them from third through fifth grade social studies classes in Hobbs, NM, and Anthropology 101 at Ohio State. The reason I rememberd them is becuase of the degree of difficulty in stringing a half-wave diople on Mt. Davidson,  W6/NC-423 . There's a pair of trees that look awesomre for just such an installation on 10 meters, but the branch of one of them is tantilizingly just out of reach when throwing a spool of butchers twine by hand. The tree in question: So, it usually takes upward of half an hour just to get the antenna and radio launched. But! Today, I figured out the answer, and it's—get ready for it—an atlatl. Placing the spool of twine on the end of a stick, and then throwing it resulted in the antenna line being ready to go on the first thro...

 Finally! Finally the antenna went up with very little fuss or muss. The key seems to be to have a new roll of twine. The little extra bit of heft gets it over the branch. Also! New York! Park: Mt. Davidson W6/NC-423 I did the easy-to-me route of taking the 43 to Forrester and Monterrey. From there, Google Maps plots out a walk to the mountain that looks like so: and vertically speaking was far from the worst hike in the world: Radio Details: As I mentioned, the antenna went right up this time. The radio ran like the little champ that it is. Unlike when I was there over the weekend, I did not couple into the antenna. I could stand up, or sit down, and no matter. I did notice that the radio picks up sixty-cycle hum above a certain height (about 10 feet?) Below that height, the band is quieter, but also the radiation angle goes up. I found this out by taking time to experiment with antenna height and see that the Utah SDR finally picked up the RockMite in the morning again. It's bee...

More on this later, but on the kids and my first SOTA activation of Mt. Davidson here in San Francisco, we made only one QSO... To Japan!!!!! The Rockmite was operating on 14058.4 MHz as always, powered by 8 AA batteries. The view from the radio: