Copasetic Flow

 I didn't manage to activate this El Paso, TX adjacent park this time, but the innovative antenna KO6BTY and I prototyped back in December did a pretty good job in kinda lousy band conditions! Then, I had to flee the dust storm and head for Albuquerque to catch a plane the next morning. Project TouCans watches the dust storm roll in with its big brother Park: US-3012 Franklin Mountains State Park near El Paso, TX. As is usual for my trips to New Mexico, my radio ops over the weekend were all car transit. Radio Details: Rig: TouCans and a Stick on the only band it uses right now: 20 meters The radio worked well considering the antenna was taped to a rest area trash can. Propagation in general was bad, but I learned a few ways to make things better with respect to the trash can. The rig does better when the insulated antenna wire is not touching the trash can lid. Go figure. It makes sense, but still. Go figure. Here's a closer view  of how the antenna was mounted, although you...

 I'd heard that a tent pole wouldn't work well as an antenna mast, but it's all we had. I've heard from folks that  a tent pole might not be the best antenna support. They're probably right, but on our last flight from San Francisco to El Paso, TX, I was a bit tired, and completely forgot our carbon fiber collapsible mast—which also isn't supposed to work—in the overhead bin above my seat. So, what we had was a tent pole! The above picture shows how to work with a tent pole mast that's shorter in length than a quarter wavelength long. You simply attach the pole to something—anything really—in nature that will provide the extra bit of required height. As far as processes go, the simplest way to figure out the first tape point to attach the wire to the mast is to hold the wire on the mast where the tree, or in this case the campsite marker,will support the mast and drape the wire down to the rig. In this way, you know that your vertical antenna will be support...

 I was able to hop over to this park twice, once before, and once after work. Operating portable with a vertical antenna netted me almost no foot traffic attention which was kinda surprising and also kinda nice. This will all get updated as I go (or not) Park: US-0795 World War I National Monument Getting There: I walked to the park from my Mt. Vernon Square area hotel. I took transit back though! I walked up a few blocks to the nearest metro station and took the Red Line east where I connected with a northbound Yellow Line to Mt. Vernon Square, the end of the line for that train. Radio Details: I used the rig's new configuration that's getting me into  so many urban parks: TouCans and a Stick. Trees on the East Coast seem to have more branches that the ones in San Francisco, so I was able to just place the vertical in the tree with no tape. The branches held it up. The tree still had most of its leaves and was quite wet. I suspect this was the main difference cause of propag...

  This a follow-on to the crashing wave post. While activating POTA US-0757 with TouCans and a Stick , (the vetical antenna version), during the wind storm, the first call in was from SM0GJN! It was very cool because it was from Sweden, but also the signal had aurora flutter! I got the idea for recording POTA activations from K4SWL. I haven't quite perfected my method yet, but I'm getting better at it. Here's what I'm doing. I'm dialing my phone into the Utah SDR, then turning on the screen recorder to record the screen as well as any media audio output, (the Utah SDR), and the phone's microphone. I listen to TouCans' audio ouput via a pair of Bose Bluetooth noise canceling headphones. the sgnal audio you'll here is from Utah. The waves crashing were under me in San Francisco. Here's the QSO recording. \ And here's the map of the aurora from  https://aurorasaurus.org/ for that morning Along with the QSO map. I'll try to get these superimpos...

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...