Copasetic Flow

 An AM broadcast station was loud in my headphones for about two minutes. Then, TouCans mysterious noise cacnellation circuit charged, and the POTA was off and running. According to the POTA website, I haven't activated US-0757 , aka the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park , in about eight months. It was nice to be back! We'd had about a week's worth of atomspheric river rains, so it was pretty phenomenal to have this view during the activation. The temperature was in the low 60s which was very pleasant. I didn't go for a swim this time, but I'm going to get back to that soon as well. View of the Golden Gate Bridge from over my shoulder The transit ride—SF MUNI 54 to BART to San Francisco MUNI 30—was a piece of cake as always. The video below shows part of the route as seen from the bus window. I just now realized that I copied my opeining into the video twice. You didn't imagine it. Sorry about that :) I stopped for lunch at the Buena Vista I...

 I've been following the introduction of RSE wire on VE6LK's YourTube channel. It's pretty spiffy stuff. It has nickel coated carbon fibers as its core and a rope-like insulator. Basically, it's cable that behaves like a rope. It can also support up to 300 pounds without breaking. The tensile sttrength is what caught my attention. Could RSE be used as a dipole with Project TouCans? Remember, when TouCans is used with a dipole, all 22 ounces or so of the rig go up in the dipole as well. I haven't worked out how to actually connect the wire to the antenna terminals yet, but assuming I could, and I pulled the RSE taught over a couple of tree branches, could it hold up the rig? It's time to do some physics. I asked GPT-5.1 to do the physics for me. Here's my prompt: I'd like to do a physics problem with you. I'm doing this to find out  if we can hold a radio in the middle of a dipole. The wire has a breaking ension of 300 pounds. The radio weighs 2 po...

 I made my first QSO on the Project Toucans CW practice app last week and it was DX to Brazil with  PY2UIA , Henrique. He also commented here on the blog . Henrique suggested the iambic keyer would be easier to use if its keying speed was adjustable. That hadn't occured to me since I usually use the straight/cootie key version. And, now it is! On the iambic version of the practice app, the gap+/- size adjustment has been changed to wpm+/- buttons: The keys + and - reduce the dit time, (the standardized time all the other iambic times are based on), by 5 ms, or increase by 5 ms respectively. Give the new controls a try on the iambic app , make a few QSOs of your own, and tell us what other features you’d like to see in the comments.

 I’ve just launched the new Extra Class Practice Exam site, and it’s officially the first app running on the new Project TouCans platform! The exams follow the same familiar format as the ones here on the blog — but with a major upgrade. Now, when you’re stuck on a question, you can click “AI Help” to start a ChatGPT-powered tutoring session for that specific problem. You can try the exams here: 👉 https://projecttoucans.com/

 At the moment, I have the experimental, Open AI ChatKit enabled ham radio practice exams flying blind: I'm not passing the figures for exam questions into the AI when the student asks a question. This has led to a really cool thing! The AI is asking students to tell them what they see.  The question: includes a schematic of a linear voltage regulator. Here's the thing though, the AI system doesn't know that, it's just passed the question along with the correct answer at this point in development.  See that question at the bottom? "Now, could you describe or summarize what components or features you see in Figure E7-2?" That's super-cool, I think. The LLM asked because it does not have the picture availble to it. I responded  that I sawa Zener diode attached to the gate of a transistor, and it was off and running explaining to me how linear voltage regulators function and what the zener diode was for. What About Usage Costs? So far, I've taken three ...

 Project TouCans just got a major database upgrade! The QSO records that KO6BTY and I log from field activations can now be appended directly from our GitHub CSV files instead of regenerating the entire SQLite database. This new method—based on an approach I first saw in Simon Willison’s video—keeps local data editable while automatically merging in the latest contacts from the cloud.

 Everything’s moving fast in AI again! Yesterday, OpenAI announced the ChatGPT Apps SDK, a framework that lets developers build full-featured web apps right inside ChatGPT. For Project TouCans, that’s a huge step forward. Just last month, I built two prototypes of the AI-enabled Ham Radio Practice Exam—one running Python inside GPT-5’s Code Interpreter, and another in a JavaScript canvas embedded within ChatGPT. Back then, those two couldn’t talk to each other. Now, with the new Apps SDK, they finally can—and that means real-time, interactive AI help during exams is finally within reach. You can try out the latest version of the extra class practice exam here (sans the Apps SKD so far.)

  This weekend I had a little extra time, so I ran a quick sanity check on the CesiumJS RF field mapping project. I pulled all the buildings out of the Python model to see if the results matched what a bare quarter-wave vertical antenna should look like on its own. It wasn’t that anything seemed wrong — I just wanted to make sure the simplest case still looked the way physics says it should. At first, he results were surprising — most of the points vanished. I fixed it. Then the field strength was highest at ground level instead of rolling off. After some debugging (and a few questions for GPT-5), the ground reflection model was corrected, and the field now looks just like the math says it should: deep null at the base, smooth roll-off to vertical, and a uniform pattern throughout. Sometimes, the most productive way forward is backward — strip the system down and see if the simplest case still holds true. All the details can be found in the video below.

  After contacting Alaska from San Francisco on 14.0574 MHz with 5 watts power delivered via a 1/4 wave vertical antenna through an apartment highrise last week, I started building models of HF propagation around buildings. This culminated in several new tools that I'll be discussing in more depths in future posts and the propagation map you can interact with towards the bottom of the page. What's in the Map Radio Contact Paths The map shows the QSOs (radio contacts) I made from the park on the top of One Maritime Plaza . Each contact is mapped out by a solid line running along the ground as well as a likely path the high frequency radio signal took as it bounced off the ionosphere on its way to the receiving station. I've talked about mapping F2 bounces before .  Fun F2 paths near a moutain outside El Paso, TX The paths in the map below use the maximum F2 layer height of the ionosphere at the time of the contact as it was reported by NOAA Glotec data . If you'd like t...

 I found a new operating location in downtown San Francisco that combines the Butterfield National Historic Trail and the Pony Express National Historic Trail and was so much fun! To be clear, I don't know if I'll ever activate either park from this spot, but wow, the architecture! And! Wow! The RF propagation curiousities! I had the TransAmerica Pyramid on one side of me  and the building formerly known as the Alcoa building on the other My operating position was from the Maritime Plaza, an elevated park smack in the middle of the Embarcadero. Take a look at the Cesium Map using Google PhotoRealistic tiles below to get a good feel for the whole area. (I'll keep you posted, but for the moment, you'll have to dial in the map yourself, I haven't had time to standardize my saved view code to all of my maps yet. I wound up making a whole series of videos just getting to the site. You can see them in the playlist below. Here's the cool thing that got me back to my r...

I’d just finished a morning round of tinkering with the ham radio Extra Class tutor when the question hit me: how do I actually get the entire exam question pool into GPT without burning through tokens every time? With GPT Projects, I can just drop in a file and it remembers. But on the API side, things always felt a little more ephemeral — every call a blank slate. So I sat down with GPT-5 to dig into whether there’s a smarter, more cost-effective way. What followed was one of those back-and-forths where the clouds part: GPT Projects’ quiet little “remembered files” have a direct analogue in the API world — vector stores — and they might just be the key to making this whole tutor run leaner and meaner. Me: In GPT projects, I can upload files that the project remembers. Is there a way to do the same thing with the API? GPT-5: Great question. With the raw chat/completions endpoint, no — it’s stateless. You’d have to re-inject your files each time. But the newer OpenAI  Respo...

 Just a brief description of how I capture audio recordings during Project TouCans outings. First, where's the audio coming from? Project TouCans of course.  It's frequently in the air, embedded in its dipole antenna, so about a year and a half ago, we started piping audio to the round via Bluetooth. Specifically, the audio out from the RockMite feeds this Bluetooth transceiver, a 1Mii Bluetooth 5.3 Transmitter Receiver for TV to Wireless Headphones For the recording/receiving rig, I use a different Bluetooh reciver, an Alura . It's the only Bluetooth receiver I could find  that would receive the 1Mii. From there, I use a stereo connector splitter. One side goes to my Sony voice recorder microphone input. The recorder is fine with the fact that I don't have an attenuater in the line.  The other side of the splitter feeds my Bose Ultra QC noise cancelling headphones. Do be honest, I have those for work, not for palling radios. The whole system, over time, has ...