Copasetic Flow

 I've read a little bit about 'local data' lately, and I've become fairly excited about the idea. Two of the features of the concept that I like are that your data should be your own, not stuck behind a corporations gated off wall on the internet and that you should have a copy of that data that lives on physical media within arms reach. I won't venture into the second one today except to say that with Google, in particular, somewhat constantly doing away with applications it becomes bored with and Amazon deciding it has and then has not rights to serve movies I 'purchased', having my data in a usable format and in arms reach physically makes more sense than I'd like for it to. Today, I'm going to talk about the first thing, being in control of your own data to use as you see fit. As someone who develops open source apps, there are benefits to everyone beside me holding on to their own data. The biggest one for me being that I don't have to figu...

 We finally got all of the relays to work at once! We've been using a HFD2 003 M L2 D latching relay as the on/off switch for Project TouCans. I should say, we've been trying to. The most recent issue was that our keying relay was rated for 12 Volts nominal coil voltage due to a previous design decision that went away in favor of 3 Volts. A Digikey order later and some kinda messy soldering and we had the 3 Volt relay in. I left the 12 Volt relay in place because on occasion in the past, we've had to run the keying line through a second relay as a passthrough (literally using the 'normally closed' portion of the relay) to make the entire system happy enough to key the rig. That wasn't the case this time as it turned out, but it was also easier to just leave the relay in there because it's superglued dead bug style to the circuit board. The latching relay along the shorter wires to the Rockmite/Tuna Topper II pair are delivering plenty of current. The rig was...

 The gang, (12 year-old Diaze aka KO6BTY, 11 year-old Mota, and 8 year-old Tawnse), and I did things with vector cross products, operated Raspberry Pis in the face of radio frequency interference (RFI) and started to update the ham radio exams Javascript charting package calls this week. Ionosphere and Cross Products KO6BTY and I put together kml files that show the approximated F2 skip of a QSO last year. The maps are very approximate because they only take the Pt Arguello ionosonde down the coast from us into consideration. To determine what other ionosondes to use data from, we needed to know how far each of the ionosondes was from the path between an arbitrary pair of QSO stations. In other words, we needed to work with spherical trigonometry. The first step was to figure out the algorithm. The solution was easy to find on StackOverflow, but it was hard to picture at first. I fixed that by getting back into using Sage for demos . The final step is shown below. Raspberry...

 The kid passed her technician radio exam at UC Berkeley last night!!! She built most of the Tuna Topper amplifier in Project TouCans and now she can get on the air soon! (Not on that rig since it's in 20 meters, a non-Technician band), but she's looking to fix that two different ways. She wants to get to work building a radio of her own, and she's going to take the general class exam again next month!