Copasetic Flow

 In radio engineering as in all thing, it pays to be kind. This morning while activating US-0757 with TouCans Vertical, I noticed a swimmer I'd seen before headed towards the pier I was prerched on.  Bear with me a little nautical explanation is in order to understand the rest of the this tale, so here goes.  There are currents in the San Francisco Bay. Currents thtat sweep out towards the ocean are called ebb currents. Currents that see in from the ocean are called flood currents. Even at Hyde St. PIer in its somewhat sheltered indentation in the shore of the Bay, swimmers experience these currents. They're a thing and sometimes they're just about as fast as a swimmer cares to swim. Getting back to this morning, the swimmer I saw coming occaionally takes advantage of currents to do 'infinite lap pool' swimming under the pier. She backstrokes while going nowhere because she adjusts her speed to the speed of the current. She also sings quite pleasantly while doing al...

 Sometimes you get an idea about two variables that might depend on each other, so you look to see if there's a correlation. That's science. What happens not as much is that if the variables don't correlate, or at least they don't seem to,  you should publish anyway. The lack of a relationship can in fact be new information. So, along those lines, here goes.  We activated US-0757 twice last week. In both cases, we deployed the TouCans vertical antenna on a pier with the ground wire submersed in the Bay waters below. In both cases, one of the Utah RBN stations that spotted us suddenly had very high signal levels with respect to our station on 20 meters. On the second day's activation I happened to notice that the water seemed closer to the pier when the signal dBs went up than it had been at the start of the activation. As it turned out, I was correct about the water level so I graphed tide levels vs. TouCan's signal into Utah. It turned out there wasn't an o...