Copasetic Flow

 There's a beach on the Bay just south of Oakland in Alameda. I wouldn't have known if not for ham radio and parks on the air POTA. Headed to the beach. The San Francisco skyline Park: Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach K-3550 . Getting there I took the Alameda Seaplane Ferry ! It's a really nice ride with plenty of things to look at like the San Francisco Skyline above, the Bay Bridge, and the USS Hornet, (after the transit map below.) Other Things To See On The Way USS Hornet The museum ship, the USS Hornet , is a short walk from the ferry terminal. I didn't get to stop in the day of the POTA, but I'd like to soon. Furniture If you're in need of a couch, the Pottery Barn clearance store is on the walk from the ferry terminal to the beach. Sooo many discounted white couches. Lake Chalet I met part of my extended family in Oakland for dinner. Making the bus connection was a little intense thanks to my planning skills, but I was able to catch the 20 about a mil...

I heard VK7ROY from Tasmania, Australia on the Rockmite ham radio up at Pantoll Campground over the weekend! Of course, the station didn't hear the Rockmite's quarter watt. Costa Rica and lots of other places did though.  And still, I hadn't realized up until that day that 'ham radios talk to stations all over the world' included places like Australia on 20 meters. Here's the sloping dipole with radio-at-feedpoint I heard the station on at 11:30 GMT that day.

 I needed a data set to try out the new ham radio QSO/spot mapping features I built today so I loaded in the Mt. Tamalpais POTA data. I was busy that week, so this is the first chance I've had to look at it, and wow! Park: Mt. Tamalpais State Park, K-1178   Our station was located at the highest camping site in Pantoll Campground. To get there, we headed to the ferry building early that morning, caught the first ferry to Sausalito , and from there caught the Marin Stagecoach 61 up the hill to the campground . On our return trip, we try to synch back up with the ferry, but we're not at all above just catching the GGT 130 in Sausalito near their ferry terminal, and taking the ride back into town over the bridge. Radio Details:    We made perhaps one of our highest tree mounted antennas to date. If you look at the first picture of the post you'll see the radio up in the antenna as usual. I was able to bring the keyer into the tent for night station operations.We made ...

Washi tape has been protecting the connections on the back yard ham radio half wave dipole for the last few weeks, and I'm a little stunned. Noticing that one of the POTA antenna setups had started to look a litttle grungy a few weeks back, I resolved to do tape wraps on all antenna connections moving forward. I didn't have electrical tape the last time I worked on the backyard dipole, so I'd used washi tape instead because I had it, and why not combine my two niche interests, ham radio, and stationery? It turned out to have been a good choice. When I hauled the antenna in for a connector switch this morning, (having nothing to do with the washi tape, and everything to do with low-balling my BNC barrel budget, more on that later), I discovered that the washi tape had become a very hard to remove shell that had protected the wires quite nicely. Consequently, after changing out the male BNC to banana connector for a female—ridding the antenna of the need for a barrel connecto...

I saw the faintest trace of the RockMite on the Utah SDR watching the 20 meter ham band, and then this at 5:30 in the morning!🇨🇷🇨🇷🇨🇷☺️☺️☺️

Google Chrome hasn't been letting me into the lgdc.uml.edu database, (maybe their certificate expired?) There's a way to tell 'curl' to get the information anyway. Up until a few days ago, I could retrieve data from the Pt. Arguello ionosonde using Now, I just get where the advanced button does not let me into the site anyway. So, I put curl to work with: curl --insecure "https://lgdc.uml.edu/common/DIDBGetValues?ursiCode=PA836&charName=MUFD,hmF2,hmF1&fromDate=2023.03.22&toDate=2023.03.23 and immediately got back the data I was looking for:

I've noticed a new phenomena that I'm delighted about: signal reports on POTA from stations that I didn't QSO.It tells me more about the Rockmite's propagation. Awesome! The reverse beacon network is nice, but more data is always better! The above  report came in on the POTA site a few minutes before the little QRPP radio was spotted in Japan: It was a wonky day signal-wise, at least for me with my small-ish amount of experience doing this. In the morning, a station was running SSB on the CW portion of the band the Rockmite uses, then the Japan thing, and then that night, there was RTTY. It was nice to have it confirmed that the radio hadn't just gone wonky. With respect to the RTTY, a look at the POTA spots revealed: SWL in the age of RBN is pretty cool!