Copasetic Flow

  A few weeks ago, the 13, 11, and 9 year-old gang and I were out on our yearly camping trip, hanging out near Great Basin National Park above Baker, NV, when KO6BTY and I got to participate in a Ham Radio Workbench episode! It was a lot of fun! (It was also one of the latest nights up we had during the trip.) If you're landing here from there, we talked about a lot of things including: Project TouCans ( page ) ( and in general ) POTA / SOTA How early versions of TouCans were inspired by the OHIS Camping KO6BTY and my writing projects regarding one Michael Gladych ( page ) ( general gladych ) ( general history of physics ) unschooling / homeschooling / parenting in general and we got to talk to Thomas K4SWL about qrp rigs We just made it back from our camping trip yesterday, so I hope to have a lot of updates over the next few days, and maybe some pretty pictures as well like this one of Mt. Wheeler and, of course, Project TouCans.

Powered TouCans is heavy.  The Imuto battery pack it uses weighs in at about a pound, making it the heaviest component of the antenna-borne rig. I've always enjoyed using butcher twine to support the rig, but it looked—and felt—very much like butchers twine was not going to support Powered TouCans, (aka Wireless TouCans.) Butchers twine has always had a bit of an issue getting a bit jammed up on the sap of various trees. This has led to be being able to feel when the twine is about to break. With the extra weight of the battery pack, I've been having this feeling a lot more often. I needed a different way to suspend the radio, but didn't want to resort to rope if I could avoid it. Enter tarred twine . I'd never heard of this stuff before it on Amazon, but wow! It's tensile strenght is higher, it can be about the same weight, and it doesn't hang up on tree limbs as much. The tar reduces the friction of the string overall. This led to no limb jams over the last w...

Earlier this year, the 10 year old known as Tawnse in these pages, and I went on a camping trip. On our way back, I came across literal found footage of strange lights in the sky that I hadn't realized we recorded. The kid and I figured out what it was, but it took a QRP ham radio to make the call. I wrote up the whole story in an article at DesignNews .

 The sky was gorgeous! The Milky Way was finally out on this trip, so there were great photos. Ham radio also did really well on 20 meters QRP. Park: Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument K-4551   Take US 70 out of Las Cruces headed East Towards Alamogordo. After you get through the pass, look for a sign on the right hand side after the rest area, but before you get to the Missile Range entrance. Camping out here is only $7 a night. You don't need a reservation. The place is gorgeous. What else can I say? Radio Details: I was at the park for two nights—silly Southwest Airlines and weather delays—but at a different site each night, so the antennas were pointed different directions. You'll see this in the map below if you zoom in far enough. The radio was the old POTA workhorse: the RockMite on 20 meters.  I wound up out on the mountain for two nights. Here's the first antenna placement: and here's the second QSO/ RBN spot map: The map above is both nights combin...

I've had a number of intersting photos and videos come out of the Pixel 6a over the last few months of camping—especially in New Mexico. Most of them involve evidence of things in flight—think meteors—during minutes long exposures. Clearly meteors don't fly overhead for minutes at a time, so I needed to better understand what the phone was doing. Here are the articles I found so far. Astrophotography with Night Sight on Pixel Phones Night Sight: Seeing in the Dark on Pixel Phones Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light The third one was written by the authors for a conference, so is a bit more of a scholarly read than the first two. Together the papers address that the phone is using HDR+ techology to average over pictures to get a better picture, (hence the ability to capture the movement of meteors in a four minute exposure), but  none of them mention if there might be parameters embedded in the video or associated image that reveal how long the meteor took to pass over...

 Today I learned that the National Forest Service will just give you a kmz file containing national forest boundaries. This comes in handy for mapping things like POTA boundaries. Also, if you'd like to modify the boundaries so say they had a brigher border, well, you can, after you unzip the kmz file. Free Forest Boundaries: Eight year old Tawnse and I got to play radios in the forests of New Mexico over the last few days, specifically at Villa Nueva State Park and again at Cibola National Forest. The scenery was phonemal and the POTA contacts were ample.  But, sometimes, especially in National Forests, I wonder if I'm actually in the forest. It turns out teh forest service has an answer for that. You can find kmz files containing forest and other interesting boundaries at https://www.fs.usda.gov/detailfull/r3/landmanagement/gis/?cid=stelprdb5201889&width=full Consequently, I was able to cofirm that yes, I was very well within the forest at the campsite pictured above The...

 We run crystal radios here. The Rockmite is a rock-locked radio meaning it operates on a whopping two frequencies in the amateur 20 m (ours anyway, there are also 40 m, 80m, and probably other bands available). The reason for this paucity of frequencies in the radio is that it has a crystal controlled oscillator. The crystal oscillates at a single, precise frequency based on it's dimensions and what it's made of. In our case, the crystal operates at 14057.6 kHz. Anway! This is all important because of Quartzfest, the crystal radio ham radio festival in, bet you didn't guess it, Quartzsite, AZ. I found out about it through Jeri Ellsworth , local, (Fremont), engineer, and ham radio operator extraordinaire. And up until an hour ago, I was pretty certain the kids and I could transit our way to the festival. Here's what I learned though. The Greyhound route promised by Google Maps is a lie: I looked on Greyhound's website: nothing. I called the Greyhound ticket operator...

The gang and I are getting ready to go camping across the Western United States. Just recently,  the bigger kids graduated to larger backpacks, so they can haul a bit more stuff, (they’ve been hauling their own tent and sleeping bags for years, but now they can take more food, water, the collected works of Elf Quest Vol. 1, and whathevs.) There was a bit of a conundrum though. Even though the gang has larger packs, it behooves one to practice with the heavier weight for a bit to get used to it, but there’s a pandemic, and therein lied the rub.  The pandemic has—perhaps paradoxically—actually thinned out the number of camping trips we take each year. You’d think out in a forest would be better during a pandemic right? I agree, but our camping route, no matter how we’ve tried it so far always involves a bus ride for the last leg. Even if we walk to the ferry terminal in downtown San Francisco, even if we take the ferry—where we sit outside—across the bay rather than the bus over...

Here’s a nice thing about camping against a mountain range; the sun goes down really, really early.  So it was that we found ourselves wandering back into the campsite from different directions, (the kids from the desert, my partner and I from a rock jutting out over a shallow ravine coming out of the mountains) at 3:30.  By 4:00, we’d started dinner, and our fire.  By 5:30, things were pretty dark, and pretty cold.  Half an hour later, my partner and I had climbed into our sleeping bags in our tent—the kids have a separate tent, remind me to tell you about how awesome that is for everyone another time—to read ebooks.  A half hour later at 6:30 PM, the gang, 9 year-old DAize, 8 year-old Towser, and 5 year-old Tawnse—climbed into their tent to call it a night. As much as camping physically exerts all of us in a really good way, the gang didn't instantly fall asleep. I know this, because the geography of our campsite created what’s a rather rare occurrence these d...

Yes, yes I do rip off Dire Straits almost every time I write about free stuff.  Let’s talk about camping! We camped this week. We’re incredibly lucky to be 15 miles from a campground that is deserted on weekdays, and to be able to work remotely from there.  We’d made a habit of doing this sort of thing, albeit further afield, before the pandemic. In Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, we hopped the 60 bus—on the bus system lovingly, and officially known as The Bus—from the airport, and two hours later hopped out on an ocean-front campground where we paid on the order of, maybe, seventeen dollars a night. Again, we lucked out with really good phone signal. Waking up at 3:30 as one is wont to do when they have kids, I managed to get a lot of work done there as well. Here in New Mexico, we’re paying seven dollars a night, or at least we were until last week. Next week... We’ll pay nothing. Why you ask? I’ll tell you! Because, fourth grade. “But wait”, I hear you say, “you unschool.”...

Twelve meteors! I saw twelve meteors in the Quadrantids shower at the start of the week! I promised the 9 year old—Daize to regular readers; all the gang’s names are aliases—I’d wake her up if the meteor shower looked promising. I went outside on my own to check it out just before 4 AM. Sure enough, in just a few minutes, I saw four meteors. None of them were super impressive in and of themselves, but there were so many! I headed back in to wake up the kid.   While I was waking up Daize, her 5 year old—Tawnse in these pages—and 8 year old—Towser, as he’s sometimes known here—sibs woke up as well. I asked if they wanted to come watch  meteors. Tawnse was in. Towser decided he’d rather get a bit more sleep. A few minutes passed while jackets and snow boots were collected, then Daize, Tawnse, and I headed back outside. The kids sounded like miniature astronauts, their snow boots plodding down the sidewalk in the cold, clear, silence of the surrounding desert. I'll give her this, ...

I'm a huge fans of unsupervised outdoor play.  I had yet another great experience with it during our camping trip over the last weekend. The kids headed out early in the morning with their nanny to get our campsite setup. Since they’re able to get there early, we're usually able to get a tent site, even during the busy summer months.  The days, the kids haul their own sleeping bags and the tent.  When they arrived, they set up the tent, (the nanny doesn’t know how), put their backpacks inside to anchor it, and then headed out for a  five mile hike into the nearest little town at the bottom of the mountain.  (The place the raptor class took place as a matter of fact.) LetGrow.org has a great  interview about the value of free, outdoor play . That afternoon, I met the gang in the same little town, took over from the nanny, and we all headed back up to the campsite via public bus line.  By the time we arrived back at the campground, the wind had tumbl...

I can’t wait!  Our annual two week camping trip is coming up in a few weeks.  We’ll head out and away from town—the one time all year we actually drive a car—to explore the forests, rivers, deserts and rock formations around us in a roughly four or five state radius.  We plan travel a lot like we plan unschooling—in broad swaths of possibilities.  We know we want to camp.  We know we want to fish.  We know we’d like to see snow.  (Yup, there are totally places to see snow in June.  It even snowed on us a little last June.)  Finally, we know we’d like to see the dry, warm desert.  We’re making a north, then south loop that will get these things done, but we’re unclear on all the rest of the details so far.  I know we’ll stay off of interstates in favor of state highways.  The little towns and the countryside are better out there; there’s less traffic; and the people are really nice.  We might head towards a few places w...

I'm working on a book about unschooling and free-range parenting with the working title: Cootermaroos: A Dad's Guide to raising Happy, Adventurous, Well-Rounded Urchins The following is an excerpt from the book.  To provide a little background, the kids who are now 8, 6, and 4 years old have all been camping since before they could walk.  We apply the same free-range principles to camping and hiking that we use in our every day lives.  On our hikes, the kids range from a quarter to a half mile ahead of us with the single rule that if they come to a fork in the trial they can't range out any further until my partner or I catch up.  With that intro, here's an excerpt on how each of them learned to hike free range! Since we’ve been camping since before the kids could walk, and since we love hiking, we’ve discovered a few misconceptions about what kids can actually do out on the trail.  Just like in town, as each kid begins to take their first steps, I take the...

The gang has been remarkably chill this week; they’re working with each other instead of squabbling; they’re taking time to make big decisions, weighing out the pros and cons; occasional disappointment have been taken in stride; and at bedtime, they’ve zonked right out every night.  Trying to figure out the secret of their success, I asked my partner what she thought.  Her immediate response: “They went camping last weekend.” Even though I don’t’ have copious amounts of data to back me up, I think the camping hypothesis is exactly right.  Our camping trips look far more like the free-range, unschooling ideal we shoot for than our everyday life does.  The kids are responsible for almost all of the logistics: they know the bus route to get to the campsite; they carry their own stuff; they setup the tent.  They also get to engage in far more independent, sometimes risky play.  The campground is theirs to wander around as they please.  On our hikes, they...

We spent our first night at the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge at Catnip Reservoir.  The reservoir and its resident avian conglomeration are gorgeous! We saw Canadian geese, wood ducks, and sandhill cranes.  (OK, I didn’t just see sandhill cranes, I was loudly escorted out of one section of the reservoir by a pair of sandhill cranes who had decided I was just too close to their hidden nest.)  The campsites are ‘primitive’ which in this case means they don’t have running water, but they do have a tent pad of sorts, and a fire ring.  The campground also has a lone bathroom.  The eaves of the outhouse are populated by nesting (cliff?) swallows. ProTip: If you take the campsite in front of the outhouse, the swallows have decimated the local mosquito population. We hiked up and across the bluff bordering the reservoir in search of an attractive looking fishing spot and a trail down to it.  We found neither, but the hike was a blast nonetheless....