Copasetic Flow

 Just a few notes on the varactor that's providing the FSK on the Rockmite and a few more notes on the FSK circut itself. This page will continue to evolve and is related to the slow moving project to try out teletype with Project TouCans . To communicate in most of the 20 meter RTTY band, the rig needs to have a 175 Hz FSK, rather than 500 to 700 Hz. I'm woroking on understanding the FSK circuit to see if it can be modified to give the desired shift. Short conjecture: I suspect/hope I can place a small variable capacitor around the varactor to bring the frequeqncy shift into the range that will work. The RockMite achieves frequency shift with its Colpitts oscilator via the following circuit from the manual and I'm just not sure how this works out. When Q2 closes, it looks like there should be a short to ground. The Zener, D5 with its 4.7 V reverse voltage, is immediately gone. Using the capacitance chart below, it looks like we gor from 100 pF from the varactor ot on the ...

 The WiFi straight key on Project TouCans is up and running! There were a few steps to the process. First, I realized yesterday that most of my audio delay issues with the sidetone on the Chromebook that I usually use to control Project TouCans keyer were caused by using the Linux Chrome browser  on that machine as opposed to the built-in Chrome browser. I'd originally made this choice becuase I thought running the Linux browser with the  --disable-web-security argument was the only way to make cross-origin resource sharing accesses from the keyer's locally served, (via file), web page, to the Pico-W.  It turns out I was incorrect about that. by using fetch, fetch(`http://192.168.4.1/light/skgo?msg=${cwmsg}`, { mode: 'no-cors' })         .then(() => console.log("CW message sent successfully."))         .catch(err => console.error("Error sending CW message:", err)); with a no-cors mode. This results in the browser issuing ...

 When hammering out CW on the amaetur radio bands, or anywhere else for that matter, it's important to be consistent. Your dahs should sound  like your dahs, your dits like your dits, and other hams should be able to tell where a word stopped and another one started. So, it occurred to me that since I was using the straight key for TouCans, I could have the JavaScript that communicates the key down and up actions to TouCans monitor and record my dah and dit lengths along with intra-character, (time between dahs and dits), intra-word, (time between letters), and word spacings. I asked ChatGPT if it could addd two histograms to measure these values to the web page I asked it to make for the web page yesterday, and voila! Right! I also asked ChatGPT to add a 'Practice Mode' button so that when I was practicing I didn't have to worry about calls being made to the Pico-W on TouCans. ChatGPT cranked out all the histogramming code quite easily. The only small snag was asking i...

I've been recording more of my POTA and SOTA activation, and then experimenting with how to  publish the results as well as exploring what information I can derive from the recordings post-activation. One thing I'm findin out is that—of course—my CW copy isn't perfect. Searching through the entire recording of an activation is a bit much for me at the moment, so I lighted on a middle ground technique: determine whether or not the QSOs were with POTA registered users, and if not, investigate those portions of the recording I was fairly certain that ChatGPT could help with this coding task. I was right. The entire coding session took 14 minutes from start to finish. I told ChatGPT about the undocumented REST API presented by pota.app  , gave it an example, and asked it to write a Python script for me that would accept a callsign through the Linux input pipe and then tell me either all the info for the callsign, or print that the callsign wasn't found. Out dropped a script...

It's not grey line here in San Francisco, but the line did just slide by two spotting stations in Canada! I think it's particularly cool that the station further to the East saw TouCans ham radio CW signal first, followed by the station a little bit to the West about eight minutes later. When grey line made it to San Francisco, the rig was visible in Utah for the first ime today. And here's the signal out in Utah at 14:51 UTC on 2024/10/26 And now Washington and Los Angelese have opened up along with the biggest signal I've seen so far from the vertical antenna into Utah at 25 dB!

 Project TouCans now has a whip antenna option! The kids—Mota and Tawnse—helped me assemble our first mostly proper ham radio vertical antenna on 20 meters this morning. We used the Goture pole I mentioned in the previous post . We're still dropping one side of the half-wave dip[ole eantenna off the balcony as a counterpoise/ground reflection for the new "quarter" wave vertical antenna. It's so nice to have data because I was immediately able to see that the poled version of the antenna is doing generally as well as the simply suspended veritcal antenna from the previous post did. The pictures below show how we mounted the antenna. I tied a piece of twine near the end of the wire to the small string at the top of the pole. After that, I washi taped the antenna to each section of the carbon pole. The rig itself is sitting on the balcony with the other antenna wire draped doown to and across the ground below actins as a counterpoise. As seen from the second kitchen wind...

 Project TouCans is rock locked, meaning that it operates on a single frquency: 14057.4 kHz at teh moment. This leads to station operation that looks a bit different from most. Notice that while we do use the RBN , it's mostly as a wellness check for TouCans. For us to call a station, they have to be on frqueqncy, so we also use the tool shown in the terminal window to the left, rbn_telnet.py . We can start it with a signal range such as  python3 rbn_telnet.py -b 14057 -e 14059 The tool then connects to the RBN's telnet feed and filters for only calls between the -b and -e arguments in kHz.

 Project TouCans is back up and running! The rig just stopped dead in its tracks during the NAQCC Sprint a few weeks back, and that was that. After two hours of debug and soldering yesterday, it's back. A few things of note: The battere was completely dead. The imuto power supplies TouCans uses hold their charge for weeks, so I'm guessing this was the number one issue. But! The battery didn't do it's usual buck supply hum into the radio, (hence me not realizing it was even close to being out of juice.)  The lack of buck supply hum might have been precipitated by the second issue I found. The audio output wire was severed within its insulation. A DC ohmmeter check indicate that there was an open circuit. I'm wondering though, if the wires were close enough together in the insulation if they weren't capactatively coupled, and therefore still producing sound and providing a bit of a filter. I replaced the wire in question, so we may never know. Here are the spots...

 The recent pair of QSOs to Japan from Project TouCans from Great Basin National Park has me wondering about F2 layer ionospheric skip propagation again. I got our F2 skips working for CZML. Here's a look at the skip path for JJ2JQF de KO6BTY. Notice the Earedson ionosonde is almost right in the middle Here's the map to take a look at  Note that the path goes for a little while underground. However, Hugyens: Check out the mountains that can act as a knife-edge barrier creating  new source. Query for JJ2JQF select   tx_lng,   tx_lat,   rx_lng,   rx_lat,   rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp,   rm_rnb_history_pres.dB,   rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter,   haversine(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng) as total_path,   gis_partial_path_lat(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lat,   gis_partial_path_lng(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lng,   id,   strftime('%Y%m%d', timestamp) as date,   strftime('%H%M...

 Today KO6BTY made a QSO to Japan from Great Basin National Park!!! Not only that, but she also made her first POTA activation! She was operating from Project TouCans as KD0FNR/KO6BTY on 20 meters. Here's the QSO map , (after hitting play in the lower left corner, all the QSOs will shown for a brief moment; if you click pause you can zoom in/out and view all of them at once; continuing with 'play' will remove all QSOs and display each QSO as it happened in time during the activation):

 Washi tape to the rescue again! Tuesday morning, with Project TouCans working better that it had in days, I noticed that the ends of our stranded wire antenna had begun to fray out. I grabbed a roll of washi tape from my pocket, (who doesn't take washi tape on a radio outing?), and a few minutes later, voila The end of our antenna was no longer frayed, and nosie was down significantly! Here's a view of our activation site from the opposite angle looking out over the Great Basin of Great Basin National Park US-0032.

 The band's looking alright to Project TouCans this morning! The map covers the following half hour table. Project TouCans is still running five watts or less.  spotter  ●  spotted  distance mi freq mode type snr speed time seen    K3PA-1    KD0FNR/6 1360  mi 14057.4 CW CQ 8 dB 18 wpm 1244z 17 May 3 minutes ago    ND7K    KD0FNR/6 385  mi 14057.3 CW CQ 7 dB 18 wpm 1244z 17 May 3 minutes ago    W6YX    KD0FNR/6 207  mi 14057.4 CW CQ 13 dB 17 wpm 1244z 17 May 4 minutes ago    W1NT-2    KD0FNR/6 2601  mi 14057.4 CW CQ 8 dB 17 wpm 1243z 17 May 5 minutes ago    W1UE    KD0FNR/6 2579  mi 14057.4 CW CQ 4 dB 18 wpm 1242z 17 May 6 minutes ago    KO7SS    KD0FNR/6 533  mi 14057.3 CW CQ 6 dB 18 wpm 1239z 17 May 8 minutes ago    TI7W    KD0FNR/6 27...