Copasetic Flow

 The gang and I made our first QSO with Australia this week! The QSO came bundled with two other DX contacts made with Project TouCans—all in a 16 minute window—which I'll write about soon. Our camping site is nestled below Anvil Mountain to the East and across the Million Dollar Highway from South Mineral Springs, about two miles north of Silverton, CO. We're surrounded by peaks on all sides. Bear Mountain peak is framed in my pictures of the rig. Project TouCans was probably 20 feet up in its dipole. This turned out to be difficult to show in photographs with the proper perspective. I finally decided to make a gif of different zoom levels of a single photo. The picture below starts out focused on Bear Mountain Peak and then zooms out to include the rig and the ground outside my partner's and my tent. You can see the Bluetooth transmitter that brings the head phone audio down to the ground hanging from the bottom of the rig. The campsite is gorgeous and almost completely b...

The 20 m Rockmite had a QRPp QSO with  SM5CAK in Sweden  last night! Might I add that the two stations involved were 5,360 miles away from each other, and that the little Rockmite, even with the cool power modification has an output of 3/4 of a Watt? It's all true. You may have noticed that in my many, many ham radio posts, virtually none of them discuss QSOs (QSO is ham radio abbreviation—a Q code— for a two way contact) made from the house. That's  because I don't, in fact, make a lot of QSOs from the house. There's generally a lot of noise in town, and while the antenna placment is apparently pretty good, things just don't pan out very often. That's the first reason last night's Swedish QSO was so legitimately strange. About 9:45 PM Pacific Standard Time, (that'd be 04:45 the next morning, GMT, Greenwich Mean Time; yes, again with the ham radio phraseology), I heard SM5CAK calling CQ DX (DX means they were calling for a foreign country with respect to...

 We talked to Japan using the little RockMite 20! It was our first SOTA on Mt. Davidson here in San Francisco, and it was almost a total wash until I heard JG0AWE! and here's the video from the outing: Summit: Mt. Davidson  W6/NC-423 We wanted to get there really early, (the park opens at 5), so we took the 43 from Geneva and Madrid. We got off at Juanita, walked through the neighborhood to the northwest side of the mountain, and began our hike. And then, our hike was over. Terminated by the closed trail ahead of us. The city is still catching up with all the trees that were downed by the rainfall last month. A brief walk up Dalewood Way—that felt like it was almost straight up—brought us to the southwest trailhead. About ten minutes later, we were at the summit with the cross made famous by Dirty Harry. The cross was built as a WPA style project during the Great Depression. Pro tip: If you can wait to depart until a little bit after 6 AM, take the 36 from Glen Park BART st...

Click image above to go to logbook entries FM5Ld from Martinique was spotted today. Cool stuff about Martinique: It's an overseas region of France. It's part of an island arc along the Puerto Rico Trench that is the boundary between the Caribbean Sean and the Atlantic Ocean.

The DX spot of the day on copaseticflows was a QSO from OZ4Z to CU3HQ in the Azores. Not a bad looking place!

I found out about a great site yesterday: A, B, C's of Dx . It's a very well written and illustrated site with answers to all kinds of questions you might have if your interested in DX. The page on propagation was particularly useful for me and answered a lot of questions I've had about getting my Rockmite20 on the air. All the material is very practical with well thought out explanations and applications to every day situations. Check it out! Have fun! 73 de KD0FNR