Copasetic Flow

 Project TouCans made it to New Zealand at such high levels that it was kinda not believable for a rig that runs 5 Watts. But then, I noticed that W6CSN who was doing a POTA at the Presido just North of me. He was booming into New Zealand even louder! I didn't manage to make a QSO down there this morning, although I did have too really nice QSOs with AZ and WA! It's nice to know the gray line is doing just what everyone says it should! And about an hour later, look what happened: Our gray line had reached New Zealand and turned everything around.

 I've been plunking through our household chargers and power supplies with a few USB-C breakout boards I purchased at Adafruit. As I mentioned previously , it's not immediately obvious which power supplies will do what, and thankfully the Adafruit boards in combination with my power supplies—so far—down-step their voltage if they don't think they can provide enough current. Today, I moved a step towards making this whole process more deterministic when I found a link to the USB power distribution (USB PD) standard on Wikipedia. The tables there at the time of this writing show: I still need to build a table of what portable chargers I can acquire, but this is a good start to—I hope—a really nice backpack or Project ThreeCans supply.

 Project TouCans managed a coat-to-coast POTA QSO with K2JVB out on Long Island the morning! The Dell wall power laptop supply continues to do great things with the rig, driving it to almost it's full QRP allocated five Watts. In other news, the rig was spotted in Uruguay earlier this week! It's signal was anyway :)

 Those of you familiar with Project TouCans can probably immagine where this is headed Could Project TouCans become Project ThreeCans? Should we have a contest to name the new incarnation? Here's what's going on. I set out to write it about this on several occasions, but haven't carved out the time. Sticklers for detail may have noticed that the keyer sprouted a pair of 5 kOhm resistors in the last few weeks. I still don't have time to explain it at lenght, but let's just say that left to its own devices, I'm pretty sure that ground at the keyer is a negative voltage compared to ground at the input of the keyer chip that lives inside  Project TouCans. This leads to the keyer rebooting itself at best, and occasionally getting so cranky that it just gives up. I believe the whole issue is the largeish amount of current that the Tuna Topper amp pulls down the Ethernet cable that supplies both power and the keying signals. The two resistor make the keyer ground more ...

 Welp, this took just under a decade.  To access APRS data, which is handy for tracking things like planes. To access  data use  telnet rotate.aprs.net When the sessions opens, type in your user name and -1 as a password to listen only: user <your_callsign> pass -1 And that's it. You'll get a feed that I won't bother you with the details of,  because I don't know them yet : ) Here's the reference . Notice it mentions port 23. That's telnet! Reference for logging files from Microsoft Telnet .

 Just a really quick note about documentation and revision control. Github will do this When the link to a line of code is 'just' pasted into an issue! Pretty Snazzy! Update This seems to work with Python, but not just plain old text.

 I needed to learn Jinja and/or brush up on my Django skills for work. I decided to go the Jinja route because that template engine is used in other tools at work, plus I could write a Datasette plugin while I learned my way around. It's always bugged me a bit that map_qsos.py programatically writes out the kml files that I use to display our ham radio outings on Google Earth. Print statements are the wrong tool for the job, which—at the end of the day—is to create the same kml lines and points substituting in different station names and locations in a loop. The process fairly screams template engine. Another issue is that even though the data is available in a database after its initial entry, with the previous usage model, I had to collect the versions of qso_update.csv I wanted to map and then combine their calls into a single file. This file was then operated on by map_qsos.py. The whole process was cumbersome, and did not lead to me wanting to explore maps of the log unless t...