Copasetic Flow

 In our last ham radio POTA at San Bruno Mountain State Park, I got to eat lunch with a Peregrine Falcon while I listened for QSOs! Park: San Bruno Mountain State Park ( K-1196 ) Radio Details: Rockmite 20 meters using a Hamgadgets PicoKeyer. The halfwave dipole was about 12 feet up, but I feel like I frequently oversestimate these sorts of things. As far as where the radio felt like it was, well... There's quite a slope headed over the edege of the mountain:    QSO/ RBN spot map: Green lines are QSOs, blue lines are Reverse Beacon Network Spots. See 'Happenings' for explanations of the circles around the station. Happenings of Interest   I got to eat lunch with a peregrine falcon!!! The raptor perched on one of the two trees that was supporting the antenna as I was making calls. It hung out, scanning the hillside below us, paying me no mind at all. Ultimately, it got a mouse! We had lunch together, although separated by about 10 meters. Also, we didn't trade food. L...

 Ohhh, oh this one was kind of painful. I've spent... a lot of time trying to master the /R function of the picokeyer, (think the amount of time it takes for a video game level the first time.) In the end,all the issues were  mine, but wow. So, the /R command when recording message on the picokeyer repeats the last word of Morse code. At first, I thought I couldn't get the command to work becuase I wasn't used to banging out a Morse code 'slash' character, and that was certainly part of it. The bigger part though, for me, was learning to evenly space my letters. Without doing this, I got results that just seemed weird for the longest time. I'd get things like  KD0FNR R R or  KD0FNR NR NR and I shoudl have thought things through. I've mentioned before that NR sounds like / , but the instructions for the keyer specifially mentioned that to get a slash character out I'd need to enter two slash characters in a row. So, when I heard what sounded like the slas...

I ordered my an NØXAS Picokeyer from hamgadgets. I've never had a memory keyer before, and it's really kinda cool! There's a thing though. I mostly disappeared from the Reverse Beacon Network until today becuase, apparently, keyer weight. First, the miracle that is a memory keyer: These things are great! I ordered a pikokeyer for rockmite from hamgadgets. I don't know where the company is located, but wow the thing turned up in the mail quickly. I ordered it on March4th, and it was here on March 6th via USPS Priority Mail. Wow! The pikokeyer is a pin for pin memory keyer replacement for the Rockmite's original keyer chip. The original keyer: The new keyer: The 12 year-old, Daize, and I were able to pop the original chip out, and the new one back in in a few minutes, and then, the thing just worked. And then we went a little quiet on the Reverse Beacon Network. Not gone, just not seen as often. The kid and I had done some antenna connection repairs the same night, s...

 I'm finding out more about the ionosphere with respect to ham radio high frequency skip communications this week. Thankfully, I've finally found an easy to read ionosonde data site for California. Just as thankfully, I've found a few sites with information on how to read ionosondes and what the propagation processes involved are. The Point Arguello ionosonde is situated in southern California. It produces ionograms like this one every seven minutes or so There's an excellent site with more information on how to read the data And a pdf document from the Australian Government office of Radio and Space Services about how skip communications work .

Project TouCans F2 Map Data provided by GloTEC

 The kids and I got to hike today! It was magnificent! Also, we got to play ham radio on 20 meters doing a POTA activation of Candlestick park, K-7493 . We took the 29 southeast to the end of the line, then walked about three quarters of a mile to the park. It was utlimately going to rain on us it seemed, (our forecast is rife with the stuff this week), but it never did. I don't have much to report in the way of mapping so far, I'll have more in the morning, but I wanted to briefly share our original antenna mount which was pretty unique I felt, and worked well. There was a wooden railing along the wooden pier that stood, I supposed, about 15 feet above the water of the Bay. We mounted the half wave dipole alogn the beam, and then, since no one else was in the park, pulled the antenna mounted radio back a bit so we could sit on the other side of the pier. The spots on the reverse beacon network, ( RBN ), were just about as good  as when I hung the antenna from trees later in t...

 The KD0FNR Rockmite ham radio posted to new distance records last night! At 250 mW it reached stations more than 2,700 miles away. The first record it set was to ZF1A in Cayman Islands. The second was to TI7W in Costa Rica. Here's the map of the last two nights' distance records: Distance to ZF1A Caymen Islands at 03:15 GMT: 2,775.84 mi Distance to TI7W Costa Rica at 03:42 GMT: 2,954.98 mi