Copasetic Flow

 I'm still plugging away on the straight key for Project TouCans. It's still a tossup at this point how many of the keying issues are my keying speed, and how many are due to various delays in the system. I got a nice little boost from ChatGPT over the weekend though! It cranked out a straight key enabling web page that it took me about two hours to massage into what I wanted. You can see the finished code here . You'll notice that the sidetone uses a .wav file. There wasn't a more simple way to get JavaScript to generate a tone that I could find than using a .wav file. (Remember when computers beeped when you told them to beep? Sigh...)  But, that meant I needed a constant tone .wav file. I, of course, did not have one. I asked ChatGPT to create one for me and the direct results were underwhelming. It produced nothing that I could easily use.  Then! I noticed the analysis button on the chat results. I clicked there and was presented with the Python code that ChatGPT w...

Or, how I learned to miss hard resetting RFI. Up until about a week and a half ago, Project TouCans and the Flying Rockmite before it had never blown a final amplifier transistor. Our good fortune with transistors was caused in large part not by any particular genius in the construction or handling of the radio, but almost entirely to radio frequency interference. When too much RF energy was reflected back into the radio on key down, the Rockmite's picokeyer would reset chirping out an only slightly irritated 73 in Morse code. Hence, we couldn't use the rig, hence we changed the antenna or repaired the rig, or turned down the bias voltage on the Tuna Topper final until we could use the rig without resetting that little keyer. Then! Then we did something that was both cool and, (we'd later find out), somewhat daunting. We removed the last of the wires that attached Project TouCans to the Earth and our RFI just went away. Which has been great for signal quality, and as it tu...

 Just a quick note. I mentioned yesterday that the rig has been rebooting when the keyer is run to quickly. This appears to be related to a design choice I didn't mention. I'd moved the headphone plug's ground wire directly onto the USB-C power adapter ground port. Moving the wire back to a ground connection at the keyer relay has solved the reboot issue, at least for the morning. At the same time, I also routed the ground wire across the bottom of the battery pack, keeping it even further away from the USB-C power adapter. Speaking of mornings

 On a far less math-heavy jaunt, I finally got around to trying to figure out how fast the auto-keyer KO6BTy and I put togehter could send CW. For the moment, the keyer's record is 31 WPM without errors. I can't key that fast, so I'm going to go ahead and declare that fast enough!

 We built a keyer! KO6BTY was gifted a FT-840 by the family of a silent key over the holidays. (It was very, very nice of them. Thank you all!) She also received a straight key kit from W1REX . (Thanks Rex!) Daize—as she's kown in these pages—quickly constructed her key; she and I added a 10 meter dipole to our now  growing antenna farm; and the kid was up and transmitting CW on 10 meters with her technician class license! Also! She's a new SKCC member! Here's the thing though. Neither one of us is good enough with a straight key—she's better than I am to be frank—to convince the Reverse Beacon Network that our callsign is actually decipherable. So, to make sure our signal was getting out and to help people spot us for event lke SKCC's SKM. Project TouCans has a memory keyer in the Rockmite that works quite admirably for just this sort of thing, but now so much the venerable FT-840. That's ok though. We built our own autokeyer ! Here it is in all it's early...

 I've run into issues of late with the keyer on the Rockmite inside of Project TouCans rebooting as the output power of the amp was increased via increases in the final transistor's bias current. Simply put, after a certain power level, the keyer would spontaneously reboot when the 'dit' key was pressed. In keeping with our more is less theme, our key is homemade. I wrote an article about it that appeared in Sprat 195 this year! The homebrew nature of the keyer meant there were lots of possible root causes for what I was observing. Here's the radio's view of the mechanical portion of the keyer. The switch on the lower left is the one that was was causing resets. Here's a view of the whole rig, battery (since replaced by a LiFePO4 of the same size), keyer, and Project TouCans mounted in the antenna over the backyard. The key switch that caused resets is mounted on the right hand side of the keyer from this angle. The switch on top is the keyer programming bu...

The little radio—its keyer at least—was featured live on twitch from Chez KD0FNR for the first time today! I didn’t raise any other stations, but I did work out how to make a cell phone tripod and microphone cradle out of a bunch of bananas, continuing the produce theme that comes with with operating from the kitchn work table. Here's the stream! I look forward to seeing if we can capture other statoins one day.

 Since the 20 m Rockmite has video game switches on the keyer, it only makes since that it should have its own twitch stream! I'm still learning twitch. The 10 year old here, Mota, has more experience, so he's helping me, and we're getting there. Starting yesterday, we got aspects of the Rockmite and it's little video game keyer up on twitch !  So far, we've mostly been doing propagation tracking using an SDR defined radio in Utah. Hopefully, we'll have station videos and the like soon. (It would help if I could figure out how to turn on the microphone. I know, the irony of a CW operator not being able to get the mic to work. Go figure.) Also! A question: I think we're the first CW (Morse code) amateur radio station on twitch. Are we? Have you seen any others?

The Rockmite has a new keyer that should last longer, and brings it one step closer to having a modular interconnect ala the proposed Open-Headset-Interconnect-Standard   Today I Learned: You can superglue video game switches to battery cases! From that point, it was pretty easy to kludge jumpers over to the three-wire keyer, converting it to the keyer that will eventually contribute to the Rockmite keying system . I had brought out two ground wires, one each for the di and da buttons. They each went into a single two wire connector that was, in turn, wired to on lead of each switch. The original di and da wires were jumpered to the other corresponding switch terminals. And, here it is in action! I'm not using the RJ-45 breakout board inspired by the open headset standard yet, but this will probably be the board placement Finally, since the red yam features so prominently in a number of the project pictures, (I typically use it as a light duty insulator and/or standoff), I mention...