Copasetic Flow

 Remember saving software on audio tapes? No, of course I don't either. I mean really, who's that old? OK, it's me. I am.  What brings all this up? a post from soldersmoke about tapesponding . One of the many amazing things the video mentioned there reveals is that pirate radio stations used to broadcast software... You know... The kind you saved to audio tapes! Back in the '80s, I pestered my parents for an entire year for a Timex/Sinclair 1000. Of course I saved programs on audio tapes! The reference to pirate radio broadcasts of software was something I'd never thought of, and it's sheer genius in my opinion. How cool! As a kid in the early '80s, I used to tape record conversations and broadcasts using my dad's shortwave receiver, an EAC R-390 A/URR. I wish I'd held on to the tapes! The kids here who are 14, 12, and 10 are still audio tape afficianados thanks to our '95 Isuzu Trooper complete with tape deck.  Perhaps we'll have to try ...

 Using my camera as a camera and my computer as a computer just works better. The video files from POTA and SOTA outings on the new camera weigh in on the order of GBs of data. That makes for some pretty great videos, but also for slowish transfer speeds, especially from the camera's USB port out to the desktop computer at home. The camera, a Panasonic Lumic DC G100D was clocking 15 MB/s downloading data to the computer. Switching to a Thunderbolt USB-C cable moved things to 16 MB/s. When I tried to move video files from the computer back into the camera's SD card, that data rate was even slower at aout 5 MB/s. Fortunately, 12 year-old Mota, (internet alias), got a GameBoy knockoff for his sib for Christmas. The little gadgete uses a micro-SD card, and so yesterday Tawnse asked if we could get an SD reader so we could  move games on and off the machine. I ordered one. This morning, when I tried to use the SD port on said reader to move files from the camera's SD card, they...

 Last night was a shorter run at things in general because KO6BTY, (the 13 year old known as Diaze here), and I got a later start. We spent what felt like forever, but what was actually only 12 minutes trying to share files from the 'usual' file side of the kid's Chromebook with the Linux side using file folders and whatnot. Nothing worked. For whatever reason, the Linux folders weren't visible in the machine's 'My Files' app. Sharing folders led to the machine basically hanging. Then! Then, we handled the issue like a couple of programmers, and instead of downloading in one system and trying to copy to anther, Diaze just ran the following from her Linux terminal wget https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/cosmic2/provisional/spaceWeather/level2/2024/203/ionPrf_prov1_2024_203.tar.gz That was snazzy! It just brought the file right in because, well, command line interface tools are just... snazzy.  Having a chat record of our work together is also really helpful...

 KO6BTY and I are making another run through Python. Diaze has learned a bit of Python in the past when she set up our QSO mapping app to pull in pertinent ionosonde data from the Digisonde ionosondes. Now, we're working with Python again to analyze data not from ground-bound ionosondes, but from the COSMIC2 constellation of satellits that provide ionospheric data includihng electron density profiles. That was the intro, and the application, but this post is more about how to informallly teach Python. What will work, and what won't? With unschooling, a lot of learning is initiated by something called strewing . Strewing as it's comonly defiined is, essentially, keeping things a little cluttered around the house. It's leaving reading material, projects, web sites, and so on, out where everyone in the house, including and especially the kids, can see them. I've widened the definition to include our entire indoor and outdoor lives, and the city and world at large . For...

  A few weeks ago, the 13, 11, and 9 year-old gang and I were out on our yearly camping trip, hanging out near Great Basin National Park above Baker, NV, when KO6BTY and I got to participate in a Ham Radio Workbench episode! It was a lot of fun! (It was also one of the latest nights up we had during the trip.) If you're landing here from there, we talked about a lot of things including: Project TouCans ( page ) ( and in general ) POTA / SOTA How early versions of TouCans were inspired by the OHIS Camping KO6BTY and my writing projects regarding one Michael Gladych ( page ) ( general gladych ) ( general history of physics ) unschooling / homeschooling / parenting in general and we got to talk to Thomas K4SWL about qrp rigs We just made it back from our camping trip yesterday, so I hope to have a lot of updates over the next few days, and maybe some pretty pictures as well like this one of Mt. Wheeler and, of course, Project TouCans.

 On one of the most interesting radio days of our recent camping trip, Project TouCans made QSOs with Australia, Japan, Columbia, and Argentina, all on the same day! The QSOs to Japan and Australia were made in the middle of their night. The Japan, Australia, and Columbia QSOs were all made in a sixteen minute window beginning with VK3YV at 12:40 UTC. What was the Propagation Mode? While the QSOs were awesome! How did they happen? I did a bit of research.  Spoiler: I don't have an answer yet. If you have ideas, I'd love help on this, please comment! Dayside stations talking to nightside stations led me to sv1uy's page on chordal hop propagation which had a nice diagram The rest of the notes from below followed from this diagram. I don't have answers yet, but here are my notes. I've been talking with the kids about radio occultation, refraction, and of course, the Gladych research project during all of this. I'm also using it to introduce trig which will layer i...

There's a scholarship available for CW ops! When I wrote the Sprat article on our keyer, I thought I was kidding, but I guess the keyer actually is for kids... er students... ummm not that students can't be older than kid age... Anyway. :) The CWOps club offers a $1000 scholarship annually for students who operate CW on the ham bands . Here's what a student needs to do to prove they operate CW "CW Ability: Demonstrated CW operating ability within the last 24 months by providing a copy of a certificate,listing in a magazine showing results or a letter from a person responsible for membership. Examples include but are not limited to the following : i.  ARRL Code Proficiency certificate at 15 wpm or higher; ii. Successful completion of CWA Basic Level or higher; iii. Membership in CWops or HSC or other club where some level of CW proficiency is a requirement for membership; iv. Participation in a CW contest where the results have been published (participation in a multi-o...

 Project TouCans was featured in the qrper.com field kits column!!! I forgot to mention this when it came out a few months ago, but it's there !The noise issues for TouCans are much improved, and getting better. I'm still learning what should go where, but my learning curve seems to be accelerating a little bit at least. The most recent improvement—as of this afternoon—is that it helps to tape the transceiver to the back of the rain shield. Wireless TouCans enabled me to do something I've never done before. I activate, not one, not two, but three parks in New Mexico last weekend! I activated  US-4551 Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, US-4516 Lincoln National Forest, and finally,  US-7877 Valley of Fires National Recreation Area. (Notice the new US designators in place of the Ks.) From the Organs, my first QSO was with Spain ! Given that I haven't published a 'week notes' in about a month, I should also add that I have a very rudimentary straight...

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...

 Here's a thing that happens. The 1 Mii Bluetooth 5.3 Transmitter/Reciver shuts off its power automatically when it either doesn't hear audio for five minutes, or when it's not paired to a pair of headphones for five minutes. These are pretty common things when you're out on a POTA camping trip as the gang and I frequently are.  (Yes, I do see them. No, I haven't had time to figure out what they are this time :) ) One of my favorite things to do is wake at about 3 in the morning to see what weird things the F2 layer is doing. I can actually hear far away signals when there's not a whole city's worth, (I love you San Francicsco, but geesh), of noise. That's how we wound up talking to three stations in Europe on our last POTA above Mountainair while it was snowing outside! But! If the power goes off on the Bluetooth transmitter now that Project TouCans is completely wireless, then I have to bring the whole rig down to reset it. There's an answer thoug...

 When we talk about wireless we usually mean propagation. But what if a ham radio didn't even have a feed line!? Project TouCans has done exactly that! If you're new here, the goal of Project TouCans has always been to have a simple, (I know, it doesn't look simple at the moment), radio that alleviates the operator from needing to think about feelines and SWRs. (Becuase I'm the operator and I don't like thinking about those sorts of things.) The first, very fruitful, year long iteration of this was to move the radio into the antenna. The rig still had wires descending to the ground for the keyer controls, power, and audio though. They all traveled along an Ethernet cable terminated in an RJ-45 jack at either end. There was RFI. It was not as cool as it could have been. Over the last two weeks KO6BTY and I finally accomplished our ultimate goal: We got rid of the Ethernet cable!!! A week and a half ago, we rid ourselves of the need for keyer wires by adding a Pico-W...

 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.

 I finally got csvs-to-sqlite to work on the Windows machine here! You might remember that the 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang and I had been unable to coerce the utility into working. That was OK because with our workarounds, we could use it on Github Codespaces, so we were still up and running an instance of Datasette that served our ham radio QSOs. It was also really ok, because with the experience we gained, when one of the gang saw a OneSchema hiring banner hanging in a window overlooking the alley where our favorite pub is located, they immediately knew what the company did, and made sure to point it to me. This led to us checking out their website, and discussing even more of the vagaries of csv files and jobs in the tech industry over our lunch. Unschooling works! Today, I found a way! First, I re-read my original post . I changed our pandas install back to 1.5.0 as the post instructs. I got further. The utility errored out because it was upset about the number of columns na...

The QSL cards for Project TouCans first POTA have gone out, so now I can talk about them online without any spoilers and—hopefully—a few clarifications and elucidations. First, this was Project TouCans first POTA , so it was kind of a big deal to the (12, 10, and 8 year-old)gang and I. It became even a bigger deal because TouCans managed to do—in a single outing, no less—something the Flying Rockmite hadn't been able to do in two different POTAs to the same site; namely, to breach the Golden Gate Bridge with a QSO! In our previous two attempts, all of our QSOs avoided the center span of the bridge leading us to hypothesize about the number of 20 meter wavelengths that might fit into the bridge span, the height of the bridge above the water and whatnot. Here's a look at the QSOS from our cliff-side perch during the Flying Rockmite outings. And here's roughly the same view with Project TouCans! Notice the green (I've added RST color coding to our mapping app since the fi...

One of the many, many benies of self-led weaning was.... No High Chairs!!! Given, this trick isn't for everyone. Some people want a little alone time with their meal. Some people, perhaps, take care of kids that don't hate being restrained. Siggghhhh, not so much here. That's what led me to discover what I later found out was called self-led-weaning . The kid, (each of the kids in turn), would sit in my lap during meals. They'd also sample my food, (that's the self-led-weaining) part. We never used the high chair. Here's the other cool part though. The kids got tired of siting in my lap when they could toddle, crawled out, and learned how to climb into their own chairs, so no high chairs at restaurants either. (Of course, my lap was also available there, so again, this trick might not be for you.) And then!!!! Becuase we were grad students and the kids came with us to grad student happy hours they also learned very quickly how to safely perch themsevles on bar s...

I like reading parenting blogs because they make me think. They make me think so much that I often times wind up copying my blog posts here from my original contents there. If you don't read Evil Witches by Claire Zulkey yet, it's a lot of fun. Anyway, here's my comment to her interview with Cara Goodwin about research based parenting. (Probably not a huge shocker to anyone here, but I tend to go with the research I already agreed with, you know, I'm.... data based... yeah, that's it.... Snort.) Wow! So much of this is so familiar. Thanks for doing this interview, I think it makes for a very much needed buffer against the impressions that I see people get about atttachment and respectful parenting. tldr; I did most of the things, but probalby, per the books, I did them wrong? I did them because I was selfish and they were easy for me in the not-even-slightly common situations I had. We did 'attachment parenting' because strollers just looked like so much w...

The 12 year-old here, aka Daize in these pages, and I have been teaching ourselves Datasette, a Python based tool for exploring data sets. We came across the tool the first time as members of the San Francisco Microscopical Society when we attended a meeting about their historical papers database. Datasette , a tool created by Simon Willison is being used to serve their historical document database . It looked like a nice tool to know, but I didn't have an immediate use for it until last week when I got a little bit of bandwidth to setup new help page links for the ham radio practice exam app . I rooted around in the Google App Engine dataset pages a bit, then I played with making pages as templates in the Django based app, (did I mention that Simon was also one of the creators of Django?), and then it occurred to me that Datasette might be the most useful way of inspecting and modifying the help page links. In any event, the kid and I would be learning something new. The short ve...

Eight year-old Tawnse made beer bread a few days back, and through a mishap, we wound up with a smoother, easier to cut version of the bread we take on camping trips. Here's the recipe: Ingredients 3 C  Self Rising Flour which can be made with: 1 cup all-purpose flour + 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder + 1/4 teaspoon fine salt 3 Tbsp  Sugar 1 Warm Beer Steps Mix Grease loaf pan Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour It's really, really simple to make, and it comes out as a pretty rugged loaf of bread that you can wrap in foil and throw in your backpack. Usually—for us—it comes out pretty tough with a craggy crust, and that's ok because it travels well, and it's for camping. On Friday though, the Tawnse—the eight year old's alias here—picked up my beer which I'd taken a few sips from and poured it in. So, we didnt' have enough beer in the bread. I opened the bread intended for the beer, and poured in what seemed like enough to make up the difference. We wound up with ...

Back in January, I started to simplify the free ham radio practice exams so they'd be easier for the gang—two of whom are learning to program—and I to update in the future. It. Was. Hard. I fought and fought and finally located the Google App Engine debug console where I could change a file at a time, (and actually see a listing of files.) That console has since been deprecated and dropped, (unbeknownst to me.) Consequently, when 12 year-old Daize and I tried to add a simple fix to a misformatted question this morning… Nope! Oh well. I went through the 7 stages of grieving, but really fast this time, and then went to look for Google App Engine deployment too for Python . Fortunately, it still exists! Now it’s called the Google Cloud CLI . Installation was actually straightforward, and since I stored the entire applciation in github including the app.yaml file, deployment was pretty easy as well. We're back up and running! Refererces Free ham radio exam practice app

Earlier this year, the 10 year old known as Tawnse in these pages, and I went on a camping trip. On our way back, I came across literal found footage of strange lights in the sky that I hadn't realized we recorded. The kid and I figured out what it was, but it took a QRP ham radio to make the call. I wrote up the whole story in an article at DesignNews .