Copasetic Flow

 The Nashua Area Radio Society did a series on the RockMite! Part 3 is about the transmit oscillator which I have to admit, I did not completely understand. Varactors kind of rock!

 I heard last night that Chuck Carpenter W5USJ is a silent key. He passed on December 2nd. Chuck was a fun person and a great mentor for all things Rockmite on the groups.io Rockmite forum . His advice was instrumental in the creation of Project TouCans and he even mailed a few toroids to KO6BTY and I when we were working on removing RFI sources from the earlier wired version of the project. Reading through Chuck's site this morning, I found a reference to SWBCI . Having never heard the term before, I googled it. And found not much, mostly references to The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. I tried again adding ham radio to the search and was rewarded with a link to a SolderSmoke post from March of 2010! If you look through the posts on that page you'll find things about shortwave broadcast interference, sunspots, WSPR, and safe-ish car tube based radio circuits! There's so much stuff! Bill had and continues to pull off the advice of Jeff Tripplett t...

 KO6BTY took over debug implementation last night. She wired the RF out from the Rockmite directly to Project TouCans antenna out and... Nothing. Looking at the schematic , that leaves a few choices for what's going on. My favorite for the moment, because it's easy, and because the part is actually very bent, is the T/R switch transistor: The transistor is a 2N7000  MOSFET. Wikipedia lists its maximum current as 200 mA and I can see where we could have exceed that when the Rockmite was shaking loose in TouCans (several of the nylon spacers sheered after a fall.) Also, keep in mind that the power bump has more current traveling through this part of the circuit in any event. After that, we'll be looking at whether or not the oscillator is still oscillating. But actually! Good news! If the oscillator weren't oscillating, the receive branch also wouldn't work, and it most certainly is working!

 I saw that I haven't written in a while. We've been busy to put things mildly. December is one of our busiest months around here. KO6BTY is working on building out here 10 meter Rockmite! It's coming along nicely and a little bit at a time. That's about all I got for now. Baking is also ramping up here at the house. Hopefully I'll have more on that soon. Oh and Pico Ws! But anyway.

Thanks to the California QSO Party, I made more than 30 QSOs this weekend running < 5 Watts with Project TouCans: a Rockmite into a Tuna Topper, both mounted inside a pineapple can with a tuna can as a covering housing and antenna mount; the entire rig resides suspended at the feed point of a half wave dipole.

 With all my discussion of Google Earth Web this morning, it's nice to know that all of the missing features still exist on Google Earth Android. Consequently, here's a quick view of where Project TouCans reached during yesterday's POTA to Lands End (Golden Gate Recreation Areas K-0647 )

The gang and I have been working on a Tuna Topper amplifier for the rockmite radio. Today, we got what seemed like positive results. The reverse beacon network reported that we had 17dB snr into K2PO/7. Seems good, but was it better than before the amp? That's where it seemed like it would be a good idea to use Datasette to review vs earlier results from the rockmite deployed at the house. That's where we started to run into issues. I'll talk more about the amplifier in another post. Here's what we learned (we is the 12, 10, and 8 year old gang and I), when we tried to convert our comma-separated-variable data to sqlite using csvs-to-sqlite . The short version pandas 2.0 is not the same as previous versions! We encountered all the problems reported in this issue for the package. We got to learn a lot, so I guess it's kinda good we didn't see the issue earlier. In short, as I wrote on the issue , you can get around the whole thing for now using: pip install pand...

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 .

The 20 m Rockmite had a QRPp QSO with  SM5CAK in Sweden  last night! Might I add that the two stations involved were 5,360 miles away from each other, and that the little Rockmite, even with the cool power modification has an output of 3/4 of a Watt? It's all true. You may have noticed that in my many, many ham radio posts, virtually none of them discuss QSOs (QSO is ham radio abbreviation—a Q code— for a two way contact) made from the house. That's  because I don't, in fact, make a lot of QSOs from the house. There's generally a lot of noise in town, and while the antenna placment is apparently pretty good, things just don't pan out very often. That's the first reason last night's Swedish QSO was so legitimately strange. About 9:45 PM Pacific Standard Time, (that'd be 04:45 the next morning, GMT, Greenwich Mean Time; yes, again with the ham radio phraseology), I heard SM5CAK calling CQ DX (DX means they were calling for a foreign country with respect to...

 There was a lot going on this morning. Propagation was almost exclusively to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains; I successfully used an atlatl to launch the attena twine; and the RockMite reached Japan!.  There were so many mosquitos up there this morning, I managed to get a rain coat on farily soon, but I'm so going to pay for that. The recent rains left a couple of largeish puddles near my usual antenna spot, and the mosquitos took adavantage. Park: Mt. Davidson  W6/NC-423 I finally lighted on what I believe is the easiest public transit route for an early morning arrival at the summit—keep in mind, the park opens at 5:00 AM PST. Catch the  43  at Geneva and Mission, or you're favorite stop. Ride to Juanita—yup, that is the first step of the gang's and my original route. Here's the change: wiggle through the streets to Dalewood, and make your entire ascent there. In aboout 10 minutes, you'll be at the trailhead next to the 36 bus stop. This is much fas...

 The sky was gorgeous! The Milky Way was finally out on this trip, so there were great photos. Ham radio also did really well on 20 meters QRP. Park: Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument K-4551   Take US 70 out of Las Cruces headed East Towards Alamogordo. After you get through the pass, look for a sign on the right hand side after the rest area, but before you get to the Missile Range entrance. Camping out here is only $7 a night. You don't need a reservation. The place is gorgeous. What else can I say? Radio Details: I was at the park for two nights—silly Southwest Airlines and weather delays—but at a different site each night, so the antennas were pointed different directions. You'll see this in the map below if you zoom in far enough. The radio was the old POTA workhorse: the RockMite on 20 meters.  I wound up out on the mountain for two nights. Here's the first antenna placement: and here's the second QSO/ RBN spot map: The map above is both nights combin...

I dropped the antenna this morning and all of a suddne, the RockMite's signal into Utah was back. This afternoon? Utah appeared again. We know why. First, in the morning, I didn't actually 'drop' the antenna, not to say I haven't before, but this time I lowered it on purpose to see what would happen. Andddddd when I did, the Utah SDR which we've been invisible to most of the day lately, found the RockMite immediately.  It's been kind of a pain disappearing from this station, because for the rest of the year, it provided a nice safety net. Is the radio working? I don't know, check the Utah SDR. The antenna's launch angle is supposed to increase when the antenna is lowered, so a hypothesis began to form—the ionosphere is 'too' high. Last night, the kid and I were able to test the hypothesis. We'd set the RockMite picokeyer up on beacon mode, and were listening to a number of SDRs in the other room in case anyone responded to our CQ calls ...

I had a SOTA outing a few days back where lots of things went wrong ending with my keyer being backwards. All in all, I love our little Rockmite PicoKeyer . But every once in s while.... HoooBoy. Feeling fairly flustered that it had taken me the better part of an hour to get the antenna up and going on Mt. Davidson , I sat down to record an SOTA CQ into the RockMite . That took a while, because well, I was flustered, and Morse Code, and Keying , and Whatnot. Then... Then... When I got done, my dah and dit paddles had reveresed!!! It turns out that the command to playback a recorded CQ message, namely, "P". Is the same command that is used in the main menu to reversed dahs and dits. A little bit of reading of the manual , and I was back in business.

Washi tape has been protecting the connections on the back yard ham radio half wave dipole for the last few weeks, and I'm a little stunned. Noticing that one of the POTA antenna setups had started to look a litttle grungy a few weeks back, I resolved to do tape wraps on all antenna connections moving forward. I didn't have electrical tape the last time I worked on the backyard dipole, so I'd used washi tape instead because I had it, and why not combine my two niche interests, ham radio, and stationery? It turned out to have been a good choice. When I hauled the antenna in for a connector switch this morning, (having nothing to do with the washi tape, and everything to do with low-balling my BNC barrel budget, more on that later), I discovered that the washi tape had become a very hard to remove shell that had protected the wires quite nicely. Consequently, after changing out the male BNC to banana connector for a female—ridding the antenna of the need for a barrel connecto...

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!

 Ohhh, oh this one was kind of painful. I've spent... a lot of time trying to master the /R function of the picokeyer, (think the amount of time it takes for a video game level the first time.) In the end,all the issues were  mine, but wow. So, the /R command when recording message on the picokeyer repeats the last word of Morse code. At first, I thought I couldn't get the command to work becuase I wasn't used to banging out a Morse code 'slash' character, and that was certainly part of it. The bigger part though, for me, was learning to evenly space my letters. Without doing this, I got results that just seemed weird for the longest time. I'd get things like  KD0FNR R R or  KD0FNR NR NR and I shoudl have thought things through. I've mentioned before that NR sounds like / , but the instructions for the keyer specifially mentioned that to get a slash character out I'd need to enter two slash characters in a row. So, when I heard what sounded like the slas...

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...

 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...