Copasetic Flow

I had the RF out leads on TouCans vertical reversed. The fix led to a very fun radio day with correlated data and radio events. In the past, when TouCans was a dipole, both RF out lines, RF+ and GND, were attached to antenna wires. Now, one wire goes up a carbon fiber mast forming a vertical antenna. The other lies coiled on the ground near the rig serving as a counterpoise . A few days back, while fixing a shorted power supply lead on the Tuna Topper amplifier component, I realized that the RF+ output port was attached to the counterpoise. I reversed it so it went to the vertical. It didn't seem to make a huge difference from the home QTH Those are pretty common snr numbers from the house. Friday though, there were rumblings of greatness. TouCans handily made a POTA activation followed by a SOTA activation where it was spotted in Japan on the RBN three times. Sunday I made a Juan Bautista activation from Civic Center that was remarkable, I'll write more about that later. The

 SOTA accepts ADIF files and they are pretty easy to build from POTA files. After a particularly successful SOTA activation of Mt. Davidson, ( W6/NC-423 ), with 21 QSOs, I once again looked longingly at the Import ADIF button on the SOTA site. Thus far, I've been unable to locate the SOTA fields that should be used, but I happened upon the ADIF standard and found that it might only require  MY_SOTA_REF . On a whim, I used my POTA template to create a line that looked like <station_callsign:6>KD0FNR<Call:5>w0jsl<QSO_DATE:8>20241115<TIME_ON:4>1740<BAND:3>20M<MODE:2>CW<MY_SIG:4>POTA<MY_SIG_REF:7>US-0757<eor> and simply changed the name of the park reference field so I had <station_callsign:6>KD0FNR<Call:5>w0jsl<QSO_DATE:8>20241115<TIME_ON:4>1740<BAND:3>20M<MODE:2>CW<MY_SIG:4>POTA<MY_SOTA_REF:9>W6/NC-423<eor> And it worked !  

 I had an interesting failure with TouCans a day ago. TouCans handily activated a park a day last week. Then, yesterday, when I pulled on the antenna wire just a bit, (I promise), the RockMite keyer rebooted which is never a good sign. I adjusted the wire again and the rig audio went off. What had actually happened was that the power supply had shut itself down. I inspected the interior of TouCans and immediately wondered if the power leads to the Tuna Topper ][+ amplifier had shorted on the tuna can. I unhooked the power lines to the amplifier and tried again nothing. Leaving the power lines detached, I decided to check if the power supply would take a charge. It would. I tried again and the RockMite, (as evidenced by its keyer), booted!  I left everything for a bit before, this morning reassembling the rig with the power lines to the amp re-attached along with the RF output line that I had accidentally broken in the process. I checked the bias voltage to the power transistor, for th