Copasetic Flow

Ever tune across the HF bands and wonder just how many Morse code operators are on the air at that moment? Thanks to WW5TH’s ingenious setup that reads directly from the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN), you can see it in near real time. The RBN ’s worldwide network of “skimmers” automatically decodes CW signals, giving a fascinating snapshot of CW activity across the globe.  Pat wrote the code up here and you can find the latest data here . Here's an example from this morning. This quick visualization from W5WTH shows how data from the Reverse Beacon Network can reveal real-time CW activity. It’s a great way to see where the bands are hopping and how propagation changes minute by minute. Check out Pat’s GitHub for code details, and watch the data to spot when Morse action is hopping. Want to dive deeper? Try building your own CW dashboard from RBN data using Chat GPT , or explore similar projects in ReverseBeacon.net and Parks on the Air to see who...

 Everything’s moving fast in AI again! Yesterday, OpenAI announced the ChatGPT Apps SDK, a framework that lets developers build full-featured web apps right inside ChatGPT. For Project TouCans, that’s a huge step forward. Just last month, I built two prototypes of the AI-enabled Ham Radio Practice Exam—one running Python inside GPT-5’s Code Interpreter, and another in a JavaScript canvas embedded within ChatGPT. Back then, those two couldn’t talk to each other. Now, with the new Apps SDK, they finally can—and that means real-time, interactive AI help during exams is finally within reach. You can try out the latest version of the extra class practice exam here (sans the Apps SKD so far.)

  Extra Class Practice Exam Get ready for the FCC Extra Class license exam with this free online ham radio practice test. Our interactive exam tool uses the official FCC Element 4 Question Pool (valid July 2024–2028) and automatically tracks your performance. See your score history, review stacked bar charts of correct vs wrong answers by subelement, and drill down into specific group stats with a single click. This version of the exam is identical to the first release with a single exception. This version has an AI help facility. To see a demo of how to us it, please see this post and associated video. To use the AI features, you'll need to have your own OpenAI API key. You'll input that in a dialog that is not visible to anyone but your browser. One of the points of these exam practice pages was to demonstrate that they could be deployed without needing server-side code, and they don't. This is the first practice run of the free online ham radio practice exams. I fully e...

Extra Class Practice Exam (Stacked Bars with Toggle Groups) Extra Class Practice Exam Get ready for the FCC Extra Class license exam with this free online ham radio practice test. Our interactive exam tool uses the official FCC Element 4 Question Pool (valid July 2024–2028) and automatically tracks your performance. See your score history, review stacked bar charts of correct vs wrong answers by subelement, and drill down into specific group stats with a single click. This is the first practice run of the free online ham radio practice exams. I fully expect it to be a bit buggy. Please leave any suggestions or bug descriptions in the comments. Exam scores and statistics will be stored in the URL when you click 'New exam/Save Scores' after you complete an exam. To get back to your scores, you should be able to use the histsory feature in your browser, or if you'd rather, copy the link somewhere to put into a browser later. Important Note: To save your s...

 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...