Copasetic Flow

 Soldersmoke opens another rabbit hole! This time, it's car portable satellite morse code (CW) QSOs. The video Bill referenced pointed me at an SDR for the geostationary ham radio satellite where I was treated to satellite Morse code pretty quickly courtesy of DJ4FF. And! It turns out he operates satellite through the sunroof of his car ! Videos

 I wanted to take a look at the ionosphere over North America late last week, and that meant I needed to explore ionospheric readings via radio occultation from the satellite constelations launched by Spire and PlanetIQ. Spoiler: I haven't been able to get ionospheric data from either constellation yet, but that's a data publishing issue, not a data file structure issue. Exploring the availabel data was a bit clunky at first to say the least. Then, it occurred to me that I could probably ask an AI to write Python code to pull out the strucutre of each netCDF file somewhat automatically. Sure enough, the Google Gemini search enginee version gave me an immediate answer I modified the code just a bit per my personal taste. The complete code can be seen here . From there, with only the filename, I could get output like Where to get the data I was having the best luck with PlanetIQ data as published by UCAR at  https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/planetiq/noaa/nrt/level2/2024/ How...

Found this cute video about equitorial plasma bubbles and why they matter from an international consortium between Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos. They've deployed a series of very high frequency, (VHF), radar to detect bubbles in real-time to avoid problems with important things like airplane automatic landing systems. Here's the video . 

 Halibut Electronics is working on a new satellite antenna kit! This is kinda cool for two reasons, first because we've recently started attending the high altitude balloon meetups at Noisebridge . Satellite antennas came up during one of the meetings. More tactically importanly though, the EggNogs docs inspired what be a better tuna can feedtrough for Projct TouCan's antenna! For notes, here's my original EggNogs documentation review reply : The documentation looks great so far! I've made it to page 17/22. One thing:     For those of us with partners heavily into fountain pens, those of us who like to print out manuals on JIS B5 paper and then store them in Kokuyo Campus binders, page numbers in the table of contents would be very cool. (I know, I know, such a niche group :) )   Mostly though, I wanted to thank you for jogging my memory into a, (I hope), better solution for Project TouCans antenna ports. At present, they're inverted bananna plug posts. Banana plug...

 How many apparent callsigns can one little ham radio bear? Google Earth on the web has a URL API of sorts, but apparently NO animation! Grrr..... Google Earth's URL stores the initial view of the map like so https://earth.google.com/web/@37.78472548,-122.50134987,111.08460648a,1238.99361831d,35y,-168.52095559h,74.50108975t,0r It may come in hand for doing something involving GUI screen scraping and unit testing  in future projects with the Rockmite ham radio. There's a new callsign in town for the little KD0FNR Rockmite. It's KD0R. So far, I have no  idea how this alias is coming about. Google Earth (at least on the web) doesn't support animation at the moment as far as I can tell. (Sigh, I'm stuck in kepler.gl for that feature for the moment.) Google Earth Studio will apparently support animation though? I hope to find out. For reference, kepler.gl is a nice platform, but I'm more used to working with kml files from back in the day when I had apps tracki...

Good Morning!  While drinking my coffee after getting a full night's sleep, (hooray for happily sleeping seven month olds!!!), I came across a cute little satellite and some useful approximations. ESTCUBE 1 The Estonian University of Tartu has successfully placed a student built and student operated cubesat into orbit.  The satellite will deploy an electrodynamic tether and test the ability of the device to propel the space craft by exploiting the force between the electric charge placed on the tether by the satellite and charged particles in the solar wind.  For those that didn't know, the electronic tether propulsion concept was patented by Robert Forward, a physicist who worked for Hughes research during the '60s and went on to become a famous scifi author[5][6].  Folks with ham radios can listen in on the satellite at 437.250 MHz and 437.505 MHz.  M5AKA did a great write up on the little cubesat [1].  The satellite tracker here at Co...