Copasetic Flow

 New ham cleans up log book on QRZ with the help of o3-mini. A few days back, after the completion of SKCC month, a ham sent out a message asking others to please post their QSOs ot LoTW and/or QRZ.com for award verification. For me, a light bulb burst on. It does matter that I log my QSOs publicly. It had frankly, never occurred to me before, but it made sense. o3-mini and I got to work. I already have a log book built on Datasette for my QSOs. I just needed to get the QSOs from there and ship them off to QRZ.com . I needed it to be automatic though, since there were more than 1,000 QSOs to transfer. I asked o3-mini to write a Python script to do this for me. I gave it the database schema for my QSO database. I also fed it the l ogging API instructions for QRZ.com.  I had something that worked well enough after about 40 minutes. After three hours, that included a 40 minute coffe break, I had a script that automatically calculated my tx grid square, (it changes a lot becuase...

Writing about physics and specifically electromagnetism got me to thinking about amateur radio. In the United States, any person can receive an amateur radio license that allows them to transmit and receive on a number of frequencies allocated by the FCC. Amateur radio is a great hobby. People involved in the hobby, (called amateur radio operators), get a chance to turn their EM knowledge into concrete experience by building usable radio transceivers and antenna structures. To get a license, operators must first pass a written test on radio operations fundamentals, engineering, and FCC regulations that apply to amateur radio. The question pools used for the exam are available online as are practice tests. I thought it would be fun to build an application that would construct practice tests on this blog. The final application will provide practice tests similar to the ones at qrz.com but, with a bit more interactivity. This series of articles will cover the construction of t...