Copasetic Flow

 A seagull had a delicious crab breakfast, be sure to checkout the video QSL with VE7JYD below for all the details. Park: US-0757 San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park Park: If I get going early enough in the morning, I get to take the Powell St. cable car to this park. Alas, this particular morning I got a late start so I took the MUNI 30 . Radio Details: This was one of the first outings with the new Anderson PowerPole connectors inspired by Ham Radio Workbench . They worked well. You can see the rig without the antenna attached below. Note that our antenna is now also color-coded. Frankly? That's a bit too much organization for my taste :) QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   Right as VE7JYD called in a seagull started working on its breakfast—a crab—on the beach to the side of the station.  You can see the video below in the album of recorded QSOs! I've been working on this on and off for the last week or so. I don't know that I'll keep it up becau...

 Reading W6CSN's post on his recent POTA at Mt. Tamlpais got me thinking. How many QSOs had I made from the region, and had I sent out QSLs for all of them, and had I updated our log database to reflect those QSLs? We have a mapable QSO log, so clearly, I could just zoom in and out on the map, but I wanted to do something that felt fancier. I remembered a Simon Willison  blog  posts about Datasette mentioning there was a plugin that allowed querying of databases based on regions drawn on a map. That's the thing I wanted. Actually Doing the Thing So, I wanted to be able to display a map,  draw a region on the map, and then review the QSOs I'd made from that region. Armed with a map of QSOs, I also wanted to be able to click each QSO to see if I'd updated the QSL photo for the occasion in our QSO database.  After working though the issues I discuss below, I was delighted to be able to search for our QSOs from the Pantoll Campground Region like so: Now that we've s...

 I had to take a few weeks' break before this one made sense to me. It finally did though, and now when the gang and I look at our QSO map in Datasette, we can see which outing generated a QSO by clicking on the marker of the receiving ham radio station. So, for example, if we're wondering when we finally made that recent QSO with Hawaii? Oh yeah, it was during the California QSO party! We've still got some data entry to do—if I had more tactical time at the moment, I'd use the datasette-write package and a form to make the entries more quickly... Anywway—but eventually, we'll have a pretty slick map. The technical details As for the details of what finally got everything to work for me (on a Windows machine.) You'll need datasette datasette-cluster-map datasette-media datasette-json-html and a metadata.json file. (This was the bit that just kind of hurt me deep down and slowed me up for a few weeks. Once I accepted that there was no way around, and then spent ...

 I've alluded to Project TouCans over the last several posts, but I've yet to introduce it. Today is the day! Project TouCans is the new, very compact, packaging of the RockMite  20 with an attached TunaTopper amplifier suspended in a halfwave dipole antenna. Here's the design drawing Diaze and I made In short, both components are suspended from the top of a pineapple can. The tuna-sized can the Tuna Topper shipped in is flipped over and used as a rain cover and antenna mounting structure. The antenna is mounted to the red and black banana plug binding posts at the top of the assembly. You saw a picture of the latest incarnation of TouCans in yesterdays post. Here's the original—and more colorful—project in its first incarnation The Ethernet port is the same one used by the Rockmite in the Flying Rockmite—for that matter, the radio is also the same one used in the most recent flying Rockmite. The first coil of Ethernet cable is attached to the pineapple can using elect...

So, I used a voice recorder for my last three calls of my Orgna Mountains K-4551 POTA. My phone then promptly dumped the recording, and no logs!!! If you are one of the three hams, (or even if you just know them/ who called in late this morning from K-4551 , please holler at me here or at hcarter333@gmail.com. I'd love to send out QSLs and also for the hams to get credit for the park.

 The QSL card using United States Post Office double reply postcards is coming along kind of beautifully if I do say so myself. I've updated the template (I'll upload it to github soon) so it does a mail merge with an Excel spreadsheet. Using the double reply cards , I can simply print out my QSLs after a Parks On the Air activation . On the backside of the card, I can paste a picture of the night's operating conditions And! If the recipient doesn't have a QSL card, they want to send back, well, we've got that covered as well There was a small issue with the little label falling out of the folded over card, but a glue roller was the solution

The QSO mapper at http://copaseticflows.appspot.com/newqso now provides sharable QSO maps! Just enter the callsigns from your QSO: Click the Map It! button and notice the sharing toolbar: Choose the social site you'd like to share your map on, Facebook for example, and click that button on the sharing toolbar. You'll be asked for a comment for your map link: And a link to your map will appear on your profile like this one . Want a link without using another site like Facebook? Click on the 'Map Link' under the sharing toolbar to go directly to your map.

QSL mapper now available in: Dutch German Spanish by Tjeerd PA3GNZ by Dieter DL2BQD by Juan EA5XQ Want to help translate it to your language? Read on! After communicating with Tjeerd, PA3GNZ, of the GQRP group and taking a look at his great Rockmite page , it occurred to me that it would be nice if the QSL Mapping gadget could automatically be displayed in the language of the gadget's user. As it turns out, Google provides an easy API for Internationalization. All that's needed are the translations of all the gadget's labels and messages into each language. Tjeerd was kind enough to provide the translation into dutch, so the gadget shown below will have labels in Dutch when viewed on a browser configured for Dutch. Now all that's needed is the translation for every other language :) If you're so inclined, have the time, and know the translation of the following phrases, please add them to the comments below. I'll bring the gadget up in more languages as t...

One of the fun traditions of ham radio is sending a QSL card to another station to confirm a contact. To do that, you need the address of the receiving station. It's also interesting to find out how far away the QTH, (location), of the station actually was, and operating QRP with the Rockmite, I'm always curious about what the miles per watt number for the contact was as well. The Copasetic Flow QSL mapper below shows all that information! Just enter your callsign, click 'Locate', then enter the callsign of the receiving station and click 'Locate' again. Both stations will be mapped and the distance between them and the watts per mile will be displayed! You can install this gadget on your own iGoogle home page, or on any web page by using the installer from Google .

This QSL mapper gadget displays the QSL address of any two callsigns and maps the distance between them. Just enter the callsign of the transmitting station and click the 'Locate' button under the 'Transmit Callsign' input field. Then, enter the callsign of the receiving station and click the corresponding 'Locate' button. The QSL addresses will be displayed and mapped. The distance between the two stations will also be displayed. To display the watts per mile figure for the QSO just input your transmitter power in watts before entering the callsigns, or once the callsigns are entered, you can update the power and simply re-click either of the 'Locate' buttons. You can install this gadget on your own iGoogle home page, or on any web page by using the installer from Google .