Copasetic Flow

 Just a quick note.  My partner and I went to see Robot Dreams with the 11 and 9 year olds about a week and a half ago. First, the movie is awesome! It stays almost true to the book in that there are very, very few words at all. More in the movie than there ever were in the book, but still. The whole thing was a lot of fun and I highly recommend it. The oldest kid wasn't there because she was attending summer camp up on the orthern edge of the penninsula.  After the movie, my partner and I went off to do errands in one direction, the 11 and 9 year old headed  towards the house on BART. And! Guess what? They ran into their older sib on the bus home. There routes coincidentally linked up for the last leg and they hopped on the sam bus she was on. About a stop later, they all realized it. Public transit and independent kids are pretty awesome! We got to do our errands. The kids got to go do what they wanted, and they ran into each othere anyway! Without transit, I doubt...

  A few weeks ago, the 13, 11, and 9 year-old gang and I were out on our yearly camping trip, hanging out near Great Basin National Park above Baker, NV, when KO6BTY and I got to participate in a Ham Radio Workbench episode! It was a lot of fun! (It was also one of the latest nights up we had during the trip.) If you're landing here from there, we talked about a lot of things including: Project TouCans ( page ) ( and in general ) POTA / SOTA How early versions of TouCans were inspired by the OHIS Camping KO6BTY and my writing projects regarding one Michael Gladych ( page ) ( general gladych ) ( general history of physics ) unschooling / homeschooling / parenting in general and we got to talk to Thomas K4SWL about qrp rigs We just made it back from our camping trip yesterday, so I hope to have a lot of updates over the next few days, and maybe some pretty pictures as well like this one of Mt. Wheeler and, of course, Project TouCans.

 On one of the most interesting radio days of our recent camping trip, Project TouCans made QSOs with Australia, Japan, Columbia, and Argentina, all on the same day! The QSOs to Japan and Australia were made in the middle of their night. The Japan, Australia, and Columbia QSOs were all made in a sixteen minute window beginning with VK3YV at 12:40 UTC. What was the Propagation Mode? While the QSOs were awesome! How did they happen? I did a bit of research.  Spoiler: I don't have an answer yet. If you have ideas, I'd love help on this, please comment! Dayside stations talking to nightside stations led me to sv1uy's page on chordal hop propagation which had a nice diagram The rest of the notes from below followed from this diagram. I don't have answers yet, but here are my notes. I've been talking with the kids about radio occultation, refraction, and of course, the Gladych research project during all of this. I'm also using it to introduce trig which will layer i...

 The gang and I made our first QSO with Australia this week! The QSO came bundled with two other DX contacts made with Project TouCans—all in a 16 minute window—which I'll write about soon. Our camping site is nestled below Anvil Mountain to the East and across the Million Dollar Highway from South Mineral Springs, about two miles north of Silverton, CO. We're surrounded by peaks on all sides. Bear Mountain peak is framed in my pictures of the rig. Project TouCans was probably 20 feet up in its dipole. This turned out to be difficult to show in photographs with the proper perspective. I finally decided to make a gif of different zoom levels of a single photo. The picture below starts out focused on Bear Mountain Peak and then zooms out to include the rig and the ground outside my partner's and my tent. You can see the Bluetooth transmitter that brings the head phone audio down to the ground hanging from the bottom of the rig. The campsite is gorgeous and almost completely b...

 POTA activation from Silverton in twenty-one minutes! Project TouCans had one of its highest ever antenna placements. It showed in the QSO data. Check out the number of 599 reports, (white qso paths.) (All QSOs are shown with their associated F2 skip paths.) I'm loving the, (very real), yet very sci-fi look of what's going on with the F2 skips from this rig at this location Most of the F2 paths actually cleared the mountain, so I didn't have to think about diffraction or other radio optics effects. VE3EID did plow just a little bit into the mountainside It did come out the other side. (By the way, you can look at all of this on your own in the map below.) But, if Ontario plowed into a peak a little bit, how did Puerto Rico KP3CW spot the rig?  Turns out, it's line of sight between mountains from here QSO Map Here's the map you can steer around in on your own! Remember, click play in the lower left hand corner, then move the time slider all the way to the left. You...

 We got to camp a bit more in the middle of nowhere than we usually do while traveling across Utah last weekend. My partner found the Burr Trail Scenic Byway. I've looked for a route across southern Utah for the last several years, but had somehow missed this really nice, well-paved, little road. We camped at the foot of an East-facing cliff, and the QSO map for the POTA reflected that fact pretty nicely: Based on this overall map, I didn't think we could hit the West Coast because of this cliff face. Almost all of the QSOs and spots paid attention to that cliff face. And then, there was N0OI: How? How had the signal cleared the cliff and skipped out to Perris, CA? Using data from the Boulder, CO ionosonde , at the time Project TouCans was spotted in California, the F2 layer skip is modeled in the gif below. Note that it clears the mesa, (just barely.) The other skip off to the Southeast was headed to the Cayman Islands. All of the skewing around is to convince myself that the ...

 Here's the query I'm using for Burr Trail ============================================ select   tx_lng,   tx_lat,   rx_lng,   rx_lat,   rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp,   rm_rnb_history_pres.dB,   rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter,   haversine(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng) as total_path,   gis_partial_path_lat(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lat,   gis_partial_path_lng(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lng,   id,   strftime('%Y%m%d', timestamp) as date,   strftime('%H%M', timestamp) as time,   'US-4399' as park,   'KD0FNR' as call,   1770.829467773438 as elev_tx from   rm_rnb_history_pres where   dB > 100   and timestamp > '2024-05-27'   and timestamp < '2024-05-28' order by   rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp desc ======================================================= At some point I'll add an ionosonde field using this map for each QSO. For the Boulder, CO...