Copasetic Flow

It's not grey line here in San Francisco, but the line did just slide by two spotting stations in Canada! I think it's particularly cool that the station further to the East saw TouCans ham radio CW signal first, followed by the station a little bit to the West about eight minutes later. When grey line made it to San Francisco, the rig was visible in Utah for the first ime today. And here's the signal out in Utah at 14:51 UTC on 2024/10/26 And now Washington and Los Angelese have opened up along with the biggest signal I've seen so far from the vertical antenna into Utah at 25 dB!

 Project TouCans went vertical this morning! Well, almost vertical. Listening to the Ham Radio Work Bench podcast, KO6BTY and I are frequently regaled with tales of carbon fiber pole mending for the casts vertical quarter-wave antennas. It finally got to be too much and I ordered a carbon fiber pole of my own. It was one of these guys  . It arrived yesterday. I haven't had time to get it out of the box yet, but after doing an antenna repair this morning, I found myself with a rig with an almost vertical quarter wave and a radial reaching down and along the ground.  I went ahead and keyed. The rig only sounded a little bit sick: vs the SWR mismatch I'm assuming. I checked out the reverse beacon network and low and behold! Signal was reaching most of the same spotting stations. Some of the stations even had more signal strength than they had reported with the antenna more closely approximating a horizontal half-wave dipole! Here are the results per station: The graph needs ...

 Project TouCans is rock locked, meaning that it operates on a single frquency: 14057.4 kHz at teh moment. This leads to station operation that looks a bit different from most. Notice that while we do use the RBN , it's mostly as a wellness check for TouCans. For us to call a station, they have to be on frqueqncy, so we also use the tool shown in the terminal window to the left, rbn_telnet.py . We can start it with a signal range such as  python3 rbn_telnet.py -b 14057 -e 14059 The tool then connects to the RBN's telnet feed and filters for only calls between the -b and -e arguments in kHz.

 Immediately after getting TouCans back on the air a few days back,  I was presented with the opportunity to see a few things about how the rig works and whether or not its antenna angle might be an issue. W6CSN shared a post about his POTA outing with his KH-1 on the same day. I inquired as to the power  he used. He replied that he was running 4 Watts into his EFHW antenna from San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, US-0212 .  I have, for a long time, wanted to find out if the Rocky Mountains barrier faced by TouCans during the day is a feature of the rig, the ionospher, or the rig's antenna angle, (sloping down a hill in the backyard.) Based on Matt's QSO report and RBN spots vs. my RBN spots for the day, it looks like the barrier might be an ionosphere thing: Matt's QSOs on 9/2/2024 Notice the cutoff  with no QSOs past Utah and Arizona. That's what I saw during the same day for TouCans on the RBN: Project TouCans RBN Spots 15:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC Here, you c...

The Reverse Beacon Network website is down today (at this moment, 23/09/18 17:29 Z). And! The reverse beacon network telnet port is still up and running! It can be reached by typing  telnet telnet.reversebeacon.net 7000 Assuming you have telnet installed. Orrrrr a spiffy script that will look for the frequencies you're interested in. (Along with Python)

Got the following data back from my rbn_telnet.py program this afternoon. It's not what the script was created for, but it's wound up being a nice use model: b'DX de VE6JY-#:   14057.5  KD0FNR         CW     5 dB  20 WPM  CQ      2254Z\r\n' b'DX de VE7CC-#:   14057.5  KD0FNR         CW     3 dB  21 WPM  CQ      2254Z\r\n' b'DX de W6BB-#:    14058.1  KD0FNR         CW     2 dB  21 WPM  CQ      2255Z\r\n' b'DX de VE6JY-#:   14058.1  KD0FNR         CW    10 dB  21 WPM  CQ      2255Z\r\n' Note that the same station, VE6JY has the rockmite coming in first at 5 dB on 14057.5 kHz at 2245Z and then at 10 dB one minute later on 14058.1. I had suspected there might be battery issues with...

I really enjoy the reverse beacon network. It's been a tremendous first-blush check of whether or not the little Rockmite is working, and how far out the signal is getting. Having said that, it hasn't been useful in the way I think it might be for big contesting stations. I always imagine someone sitting in their plush chair locked away in a shack watching the RBN . A path pops up on the map to some faraway DX station. Said ham leaps into motion clacking several switches to bring the appropriate antennas, tuners, and amplifiers into play for the band the dx station happens to be on, and then belts out a 100+ Watt signal to make the QSO. But, that's not how it works with the Rockmite when you live in a densely populated urban area like San Francisco. Typically, the radio and I aren't even at home, much less in a shack. We're perched on the side of a mountain somewhere because there's less noise, and there are whole swaths of hams like SOTA and POTA that want to...

I used ChatGPT to code a ham radio reverse beacon network filter for the Rockmite using telnet and Python this morning. It was my first really productive coding session with ChatGPT , and I loved it. Maybe the most fun part of it for me is that I get to make up stories as I code: And then, after I'd introduced Penelope, I got to explain her and, more to the point, my plight. ChatGPT proceeded to dump out very useful code that put me and the 12 year-old here who's learning to code in Python on our way. Later, we needed help sending in commands to the telnet server, so I asked ChatGPT what Penelope would do: There was a little confusion about how to get the exception handling to close the program on Ctrl+C just right, so I asked ChatGPT for more help: A few hours later, after we got home from the coffee shop, the kid and I had a script up and running: I'll tell you more about it in another post, but you can look at it here .

I've noticed a new phenomena that I'm delighted about: signal reports on POTA from stations that I didn't QSO.It tells me more about the Rockmite's propagation. Awesome! The reverse beacon network is nice, but more data is always better! The above  report came in on the POTA site a few minutes before the little QRPP radio was spotted in Japan: It was a wonky day signal-wise, at least for me with my small-ish amount of experience doing this. In the morning, a station was running SSB on the CW portion of the band the Rockmite uses, then the Japan thing, and then that night, there was RTTY. It was nice to have it confirmed that the radio hadn't just gone wonky. With respect to the RTTY, a look at the POTA spots revealed: SWL in the age of RBN is pretty cool!

Yet another new feature has been added to the ham radio RBN spot/QSO mapping project. I'm really starting to like the way the maps look these days. The latest new feature places 'R' icons at reverse beacon network stations and 'radio station' icons at the sites of QSOs so the two different kinds of activity can be easily distinguished. You can read more about it at github in the associated issue .

I ordered my an NØXAS Picokeyer from hamgadgets. I've never had a memory keyer before, and it's really kinda cool! There's a thing though. I mostly disappeared from the Reverse Beacon Network until today becuase, apparently, keyer weight. First, the miracle that is a memory keyer: These things are great! I ordered a pikokeyer for rockmite from hamgadgets. I don't know where the company is located, but wow the thing turned up in the mail quickly. I ordered it on March4th, and it was here on March 6th via USPS Priority Mail. Wow! The pikokeyer is a pin for pin memory keyer replacement for the Rockmite's original keyer chip. The original keyer: The new keyer: The 12 year-old, Daize, and I were able to pop the original chip out, and the new one back in in a few minutes, and then, the thing just worked. And then we went a little quiet on the Reverse Beacon Network. Not gone, just not seen as often. The kid and I had done some antenna connection repairs the same night, s...

 In electronics engineering classes at both Ohio State and Texas A&M I did homework problem after  homework problem working out radio wave propagation. One of the fundamental points was that radio waves are just another kind of light, and therefore behave like light. Radio waves however are not like visible light in one major way, their wavelenghth. The Rockmite operates on the 20 meter ham radio band. That means that the radio waves emitted  by the little ham radio have a wavelength of (about) 20 meters. Meanwhile, visible green light (as an example) has a wavelength of about 510 nanometers (that's 510 billionths of a meter.) This rather huge difference in wavelengths affects how the two different kinds of 'light' interact with their worlds and —for me —produces rather dissapointing results. While we can use the same field equations for both green light and radio waves, in a lot of cases radio waves do not (apparently) behave like the green light we're used to. For...

 It's so much fun when the propagation physics works out in amateur radio. The last few days, the little Rockmite 20 meter radio de KD0FNR has caught the grey line to canada, and the immediately been seen nowhere again until the sun completely up about two hours later. Here's what the gang and I have seen while watching the Reverse Beacon Network while calling CQ. On Mondy, the Rockmite was heard as the grey line crossed the spotting station in Canada I should point out again , that no, we're not in Nebraska, we just freuqently get aliased from KD0FNR to KD0F.  Then, today we hit the grey line on both sides, first as it passed by us: And then one last time as it passed by the spotting station about 10 minutes later: And then, just as the day before, nothing for a few more hours: The above picture was taken just now when I'm writing this up now, so please ignore the picture's grey line, but do look at the time stamps between the last Canada spot, VE6JY and the firs...

 Anyone with a github account can capture their ham radio station reverse beacon network spots and map them over time using kepler.gl . I've been working from Simon Wilison's screen scraping examples to create animated maps of the Rockmite's reverse beacon network spots . I believe, (and hopefully I'm about to find out), that I've created enough documentation that others should be able to fork the project to create their own maps! So, before I show what can be done with the tool, if you're interested, please follow the instructions , and let me know how it goes! Also, if you can't follow the instructions, or something doesn't work, please file an issue on the project, and I'll get to work on addressing it. I'll cover this more in a future post, but here's something interesting I saw in the spotting data from the Rockmite leading into last night's NAQCC sprint .  Utah and Arizona are one of the Rockmite's usual strong spots, and ind...

 I was intrigued by Simon Wilison's posts about screen scraping data using github, so I got right to work on it with respect to tracking the Rockmite's antenna performance, and WOW! The map above was created using data from the new project so far. Screen Scraping via the Network Tab of the Chrome Browser Developer Tools Tab Using Simon's lightning talk , it was pretty easy to find the data I wanted from the RBN site.  Github Actions Again pulling from Simon's talk, I was pretty quickly able to create a github action that runs a few times an hour to collect all the calls spotted from ham radio call signs that fit the pattern "KD0*". It took me a large-ish bit of time to debug whether or not the curl command or the jq command used to process the data were having issue. (It was  the curl command. If  your URL has arguments following a '?' you'll need to enclose it in double quotes.) Now that I was pulling out the call data , the immediate next issue...

 This is kinda interesting, and gives me a bit more faith as well as a bit more data in and about the Rockmite. (Funny how those two things—faith and data—often go hand in hand.) The Reverse Beacon Network, (RBN), uses software to decode Morse code. The software is quite good, but today I found out it's not perfect. While working on my own python script for reading the telnet data stream that feeds the RBN site directly, I typed in a search string for my callsign—KD0FNR—as KD0*. Then, I tried doing the same thing on the RBN web site. The results I got back were unexpected, but answered a lot of questions. RBN map showing KD0F* QSOs Callsigns that were variants of mine like KD0F, KD0FN and KD0FX were returrned. A lot of them appear to actually be my callsign misinterpreted by the software Morse code decoder, and tell a story of the radio's operations that fill in the gaps I've been wondering about up until now. KD0FN is almost certainly me since a review of the FCC database...