Copasetic Flow

Getting back to that Argentina call. One thing KO6BTY pointed out was that the FoF2 numbers didn't look normal. She was correct to an extent. They definitely didn't look like they did a few  months ago. Early morning UTC time, the critical frequency numbers looked like this Critical Frequency at time of QSO to LW2DO in Argentina A few months ago, in February though, they looked like this at roughly the same time of day. Critical Frequency map in February of 2025 a few hours earlier in the day Patterns in the F2 Layer If you're curious how she spotted the difference quickly, we've identified features that are usually on the map, the 'goose', and the 'face.' The Goose The Goose is characterized in profile with it's beak usually outlined in blue. It's circled by the green line above. The Face The Face is perhaps a bit more obvious. Again, it's circled in green. The two low critical frquency zones, (black regions), form the eyes. The black spot ...

 GPT5 helped me understand how the Tuna Topper ][ amplifier in Project TouCans operates yesterday. It started from just this clip of the schematic! While debugging the power supply relay of Project TouCans a few days ago, I noticed an interesting thing. With the Pico-W rig controller plugged into the supply brick TouCans itself was only being doled out twelve volts by the phone charging brick in its base, not the fifteen volts its USB-C adapter was asking for. That mattered the most to the Tuna Topper II  amplifier that drives the five watts to the antenna. I changed the rig so that, for now,  the Pico-W runs on three AA batteries. That upped the supplly to the rig back to its intended fifteen volts. I wanted to understand in broad terms what that meant for the power output of the rig. I tooled around for a bit on paper and spreadsheets before it occurred to me to ask GPT5. I didn't expect to get an answer at all. I definitely didn't expect it to be able to read the sc...

 Early Sunday morning, the code generated by ChatGPT became noticeably clunky. Why!? I figured it out when this message arrived Ah yes! The LLM that berates me a bit for the code it wrote :) At some point after the release of GPT5, OpenAI started defaulting my chats back to 4o. For me GPT5 is better. I switched back over 5 and a bit later, the code coming out of the LLM was just working, and when it didn't, I got messages like this By the way, at that point GPT5 was fixing code created by 4o when I had specifically asked for: " Also save the vh and vw settings of the subpanel in subpanelsize and resize it to its original extent if the subpanelsize arg is present in a url  " Anyway! GPT5 rocks for me. If you're using the browser UI instead of the API, check to see what model you're using before you go too far down the wrong path.

 I frequently find myself zooming in and out of QSO maps to see where the sun was with regard to my station's horizon  vs how far a given QSO propagated. I wanted a way to view maps without all the zooming. Now I have it! How I got It I've had Cesium maps on the blog for a while. Once I got the idea for a better way to view QSO maps, I deliberately executed on the habit I've been trying to build in myself:  I immediately asked GPT5 if it could augment my existing code. It turned out that it definitely could. In under half an hour, I had the new map view pictured above. You can steer around the maps at my POTA post .  The code for implementing map in map can be found in the csm-map-n-map repo.