Copasetic Flow

Powered TouCans is heavy.  The Imuto battery pack it uses weighs in at about a pound, making it the heaviest component of the antenna-borne rig. I've always enjoyed using butcher twine to support the rig, but it looked—and felt—very much like butchers twine was not going to support Powered TouCans, (aka Wireless TouCans.) Butchers twine has always had a bit of an issue getting a bit jammed up on the sap of various trees. This has led to be being able to feel when the twine is about to break. With the extra weight of the battery pack, I've been having this feeling a lot more often. I needed a different way to suspend the radio, but didn't want to resort to rope if I could avoid it. Enter tarred twine . I'd never heard of this stuff before it on Amazon, but wow! It's tensile strenght is higher, it can be about the same weight, and it doesn't hang up on tree limbs as much. The tar reduces the friction of the string overall. This led to no limb jams over the last w...

 For me at least, there's no embed button on the share tab for YouTube shorts. I figured out how to get the videos in anyway. Step 1: Start with an embed iframe from any of your videos that aren't shorts. For example: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/idZ80-7WR4w?si=CFqyqDeqzq24OLVh" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> Then, grab the web link to your short from the sharing tab that you can access For example: https://youtube.com/shorts/5D1Bue0KSss?si=3MnCtoyuuxqOJbdh Copy the portion of the link that follows 'shorts/'. In the above example, you'd copy: 5D1Bue0KSss?si=3MnCtoyuuxqOJbdh Paste it into your usual iframe over the portion o the link that follows 'embed/' like so: <iframe width="560" height=...

I swear there used to be a shortcut key to demote outline levels to body text in Microsoft word that was Ctrl+Shift+n. Wherever I picked up that piece of knowled it is no longer valid. The way to demote to body text when you're in outline view is now to type alt+u+b in sequence. The line your cursor is on will be demoted to body text.

I've had a number of intersting photos and videos come out of the Pixel 6a over the last few months of camping—especially in New Mexico. Most of them involve evidence of things in flight—think meteors—during minutes long exposures. Clearly meteors don't fly overhead for minutes at a time, so I needed to better understand what the phone was doing. Here are the articles I found so far. Astrophotography with Night Sight on Pixel Phones Night Sight: Seeing in the Dark on Pixel Phones Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light The third one was written by the authors for a conference, so is a bit more of a scholarly read than the first two. Together the papers address that the phone is using HDR+ techology to average over pictures to get a better picture, (hence the ability to capture the movement of meteors in a four minute exposure), but  none of them mention if there might be parameters embedded in the video or associated image that reveal how long the meteor took to pass over...

 There are more radio stations than I thought at UC Berkeley. To be specific, there's two. Yesterday, the KD0FNR Rockmite was seen by both of them: the first piece of evidence that changing the conductor diameter of the half wave dipole had a measurable effect. As it  turns out, changing the dipole conductor width led to more questions than answers & also better propagation... maybe. The aerial wires for the Rockmite's dipole have always seemed somewhat vanishingly small to me. I don't have an exact size right now, but if I had to guess, I'd go with them being 24 AWG or about 02 inches in diameter. They're signle stranded wires that break at the BNC to banana plug adapter about once a week, gradually shortening the antenna and raising its resonant frequency. Out of a suspicion (vague recolection from EM class?) that a higher diameter wire would result in better power output, and some vaguely supporting research materials, I swapped out the single strand wires fo...

 Listening to a recording of myself sending Morse code over the weekend, it finally occurred to me why KD0FNR is frquently aliased as KD0F by the Reverse Beacon Network: NR sounds a lot like the character '/'. The LCWO code practice site made it easy to tell you  and  show you: First, listen to the entire KD0FNR callsign: Now, listen to just NR: And now, here's the character '/': Hear the similarity? The RBN ignores characters after '/'. Thus, the 'slash' (that's really NR) is ignored, and the callsign KD0FNR truncates to KD0F. Ham Radio and Unschooling The middle kid, 10 year-old Mota, is mildly interested in ham radio and he's learning Morse code. He is however, very interseted in programming. Consequently, he's been working though an html5 game programming book. In the book, he's having to learn both html and JavaScript. Consequently, he knows what a div is, and he knows where his JavaScript code gets pulle...

 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...

 Chirping Morse code! Yes, chirping! I was treated to a few minutes of bird song on the first ham radio morning of the year listening in on the Utah SDR . The chirping was courtesy of WA5BDU out of Arkansas. When I asked what the chirping was about he explained he was using a 1960s VFO (variable frequency oscillator) and that while he'd made every effort to make it stable that in that sort of VFO keying the transmitter caused the frequency of the VFO to shift just a bit causing the chirp. I'm looking forward to building a slug tuned VFO for the Rockmite, (actually a second altered Rockmite). Hopefully we'll hear the same. More on the VFO here .

Keep microscop slides... clean! New Q Codes; (Learning by using: aka experiential learning.)  I started a new github repository for notes on my goal of using the Foldscope to look at something every day. It worked. I looked. What I learned: I put a solder blob scraped off the bottom of the radio case into a slide with two adhesive transparent sitckers holding it in place. I learned thta I have to be super careful to keep other things out of the slide, especially with the adhesive covers. There were lots of interesting things to look at, but not many of them involved the edge of the solder blob. CW Operation (Morse Code): I learned two new Q-Codes today, one by using it QSK: "Can I interrupt?", and another by hearing it: QRZ: "Who is calling me?" There's a nice Q Code reference at: There's a nice page of ham radio CW abbrevisations at  https://cwops.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CW-Abbreviations.pdf The site is run by KB6NU who've I've been acquain...

How to measure ham radio QRPp using a device from my past. How to jailbreak your thesis. Gudermanians? Measuring QRP Power   I haven't seen a lot of QRP, (low power amatuer radio transmitter), power meter projects. The ones I have found, usually mention that it's difficult to measure low powers, (the Rockmite nominally outputs 500 mW aka QRPp.) This has been a bit of a mystery to me until today when I found this video from Mark Smith, N6MTS: In short, Mark explains that the issue is the drop across the rectifying diode used to generate the DC-ish current used to drive the meter. If the RF peak voltage is too low to forward bias the diode, then there's no measurement. A bias voltage can be applied to the diode to make it just-ready-to-go all the time, but that is difficult per N6MTS, (I haven't learned why yet.) Mark's solution is to use an Analog Devices logarithmeic amplifier. The amplifier has an output indicating peak RF power at the input. Mark's plan (as ...

 Let's start with the good news: the little desktop Rockmite made a QSO with K7ZAD in Farmington, Utah today.  While this was happening though, the reverse beacon netork detected absolutely nothing . I learned that the RBN is A tool for testing antenna changes, but kinda obviously, not the ONLY tool. I also learned about rain! I'd read that rain clouds do not attenuate HF signals. I had my doubts since I hadn't been able to make QSOs or even hear many other stations during rain storms. Turns out though, as explained in HRWB 168 - Audio for Digital Modes with Michael Black , rain drops make static, so effectively the noise floor that I'm hearing signals against is increased. And finally, I tried printing the QSL card templates via Google Docs rather than Microsoft Word, and it did not work.. Google Docs is limited in the size of pages it knows about, and the USPS double postcard is not one of Docs' known sizes. Apparently there is a plugin that will allow this, but ...

Mark Twain wrote about examples of synchronicity: thinking of a friend in the morning and then receiving a letter from them in the afternoon and whatnot. A similar thing happened here yesterday. I received my RJ-45 breakout boards for the flying Rockmite at lunch. Last night, I listened to Episode 167 of Ham Radio Workbench where Mark N6MTS discussed his newly proposed open headset standard . And there it was, a system (a standard no less! that advocated for using RJ-45 connectors as well as CAT-5 cable between a radio and it's control/output equipement. That use of RJ-45 connectors has strengthened my conviction while inspiring a more complete idea for the whole Flying Rockmite system! Prior to listneing to the podcast, I was very proud of myself for deicding to put in the energy to add a single RJ-45 connector to the Flying Rockmite so that it woul be easy to maintain. I still intended for the other end of the cable, the end hanging to the ground to look like this After all, wi...