Copasetic Flow

  Almost a year ago, I made a POTA activation from DC in Freedom Plaza. I'm discussing antennas and buildings today with Bill Meara of the soldersmoke blob and published this map to carry along the conversation. I alternately convince my myself that buildings do not matter, and then a few weeks later, that they do. QSO Map

 The Soldersmoke blog referenced a post about a really cool missile tracking helical antenna.  Soldersmoke reference to EI7GL's writeup of the antenna. The specificity of the plaque down to the Marker Number reminded that the gang, my partner, and I had visited the White Sands Missile Range outdoor missile museum back in 2017 . Glancing through my pictures to see if we'd taken a look at the antenna, I came across this doozy which had this plaque on display in front of it I'm just saying here: when you have to start out with the sentence, "Not a flying saucer" and then follow up later with "action was initiated to start the vehicle spinning for stability" and then offhandedly mention that the vehicle traveled at 1.2 times the speed of sound before firing an explosive charge at apogee... ahem... Not a flying saucer indeed, but you know, totally a flying saucer :) Here's the entire plaque text: " Balloon Launched Decelerator Test Vehicle Not a f...

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!

 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.

 I started out wondering how to attach videos to kml maps and wound up working on elevation profiles. There's always something new to learn on this project. It's pretty cool! There's something I've often wondered about with respect to QRP on twenty meters with low antennas: how much help is the rig getting from the slope of the hillsides I transmit from? Using Google Earth elevation profiles, It looks like I'll be able to get quantitative answers! The Goal Map the elevation profile of the terrain Project TouCans is situated on in the direction of the transmit path to the other station in a give QSO (radio contact.) The idea is to wind up with something like this. The Steps to Get it Done (First Prototype) Issue: The elevation profile from station to station tends to be very long. I'd like to only look at the profile over a few twenty meter wavelenghts. I don't see any zoom controls in Google Earth for the elevation pofile, so I'll plot a shorter line on...

The latest fun engineering problem in ham radio Project TouCans! There's an unhappy capacitor lurking somewhere! I've realized that what I thought was a water intrusion issue is not. It actually appears to be stray capacitance, but where? And is it even stray capacitance? The main, bad symptom Immediately after charging the battery, the radio when hooked up to the new charged brute merely buzzes. The magic fix There's one way around this that works somewhat reliably, and that's to do what's called a 'battery terminal rub start'. This entails the following Attach the radio to the keyer, (which  also sends p9ower up to the radio in the antenna) by plugging its Ethernet cable in. The batter is disconnected at this state. Attach the keyer's negative terminal wire to the negative battery terminal Do not attach the radio's positive terminal wire to the battery. Intead: Rub the edge of the keyer's terminal wire on the gnurled surface of the positive bat...

 Discussing ham radios embedded in antennas in the comments of the previous post this morning inspired me to look through some POTA videos and make a new one. Here's a Google Earth tour of the path from the Organ Mountains to Stanford, straight through Baylor Pass. And... Here's Baylor Pass up close.

 I spent some time testing out a theory about briefly running a quarter wave vertical antenna from the backyard.The short answer? The theory did not pan out during an empirical trial this morning. A few days ago, while adjusting the antenna with the radio in beacon mode, I accidentally dropped the end that stretched down to the backyard. The sturdy little radio bounced off of some chicken wire below our back deck. The rig—still embedded in the antenna—was about five feet off the ground, hanging from it's antenna mount on the second floor of the house, and still transmitting. When I got everything sorted back out about half an hour later, I noticed something that seemed weird. The radio had reached W3UA and W3RGA just before it went away during my fixes. I knew I had data on the whole thing , so I put off checking things out until last night. After I updated my database, I wrote a query that found the dropped antenna data select rowid, id, tx_lng, tx_lat, rx_lng, rx_la...