Copasetic Flow

 Here's another example of how unschooling works. You're sitting around minding your own business, when a kid walks by and asks what USB is. They don't mean Universal Serial Bus, they mean Upper Sideband. They noticed it on the software defined radio screen . So, you wind up explaining about mixers. Not a whole lot, just enough. You explain that when you modulate you create the carrier signal (14 or so megahertz in our case) as well as a modulated signal above the carrier and a modulated signal below the carrier.  These two signals carry the voice, data, or whatever you modulated with. You then explain that the AM 9 band shortwave doesn't pick up Morse code super well because it wants to hear both sidebands and Morse code (CW) tends to act like a single sideband. They wander off. You'll ge the opportunity to cover more details later. A few hours later, you find out they can practice Morse code on the radio while you operate the station as long as you're present....

 After losing the negative power lead while transporting the radio that's supposed to be ultra-easy to transport, (I'm trying to develop a type of ham radio akin to free-running, but anyway), it became apparent the RJ45 connector needed to move inside the radio case sooner rather than later. Here's the broken power lead: Yes, produce is an important part of amateur radio around here. The initial idea was to use a dremel to cut notch the box for the RJ45 connector, but there wasn't a shaft for the cutting blade. The next idea was to use a hacksaw, but well, there wasn't a blade for the hacksaw. But! The maker space I work in, Noisebridge , did have a pair of tin shears! Oh My Goodness! It was so easy! It was like cutting paper.  There were a few issues entirely of my own creation. I forgot I had the box of spiffy matching nylon spacers in my backpack, so the first prototype wound up with mismatched metal spacers: (Notice how the wall of the box is simply folded down...

 I've been using the Northern Utah SDR site to augment the Rockmite's receiver. It turns out, per the organizations' CW listening tutuorial, so are a lot of other users. The tutorial, in addition to quelling my anxiety about my use mode offers insights into how the SDR is put to best use for CW: Sushi Rice!!! I learned something new about one of my favorite things: sushi rice! Turns out it's sweet because it's cooked with Mirin! We use Mirin in a salmon glaze, but I had no idea it was in sushi rice as well. Yum! I found out thanks to a Christmas present I received, Let's Make Dumplings! by Sarah Becan and Hugh Amano.  I used to read Sarah's web comics. The book has the same tone and flavor (see what I did there?)

 While my Masters dissertation hasn't been made public domain yet, I found the pages pertaining to the logarithmic amplifier in one of my way back machines—a briefcase I won in science fair that I used to cart things around in graduate school. I also found cassette tapes of talks from the 2000 Java One conference hosted in San Francisco: one on aspect oriented and another on testing object oriented systems . If you ever wondered how people reviewed conference talks before the age of Zoom and YouTube, in this case, it was cassette tapes. Prepping to construct a standing wave ratio, (SWR), meter for the Rockmite has brought me to the end of years of trepidation I developed reading amateur radio books about winding toroids . After spending a few decades with fears of ‘ruining a toroid’ permeating me like the magnetic field through a FT50-43 ferrite core, I’ve finally come up with a solution: order more magnet wire than I need. Gosh. That was easy.  The instructions I found for ...

 The remote KD0FNR rockmite ham radio station finally came together easily at Noisebridge, our local San Francisco maker space. After unceremoniously  dumping the radio from the second floor to the ground a few times—thank goodness for solid state construction and good-enough solder joints—everything came together today. The radio was mounted on the end of a 1 x 2 inch piece of wood using a bar clamp, and then suspended about five feet out the second floor window. The rig still made it out to Utah quite handily! There were no CQ responses, but it's really nice to have station setup and tear-down to under 10 minutes on either side. Here's a video of the setup: And the twitch stream of the rig into Utah on SDR.

 The Rockmite ham radio could be heard in Mauii on a software defined radio (SDR) yesterday afternoon on 20 meters! I decided to try the station on a lark more to verify what I thought "couldn't" happen than anything else, and there the little Rockmite was CWing away in the static.   Here's a recording of the signal: Interesting things to note about this : First, a geodesic drawn through and at a perpendicular to the antenna, roughly, points in the direction Utah (lots of contacts with Utah), and Maui. Second, the antenna is located on the East Side of a ridge line. The feedpoint is maybe 3 feet above the ground as seen from Maui. As seen from the East, the antenna is 120 metes about sea level, (and the Bay), per Google Earth.  From the ground that you can actually stand on below the antenna the feeed point is about 20 feet up.   For those who haven't been following along, the antenna is an inverted vee halfwave dipole suspended outside the kitchen window su...

The little radio—its keyer at least—was featured live on twitch from Chez KD0FNR for the first time today! I didn’t raise any other stations, but I did work out how to make a cell phone tripod and microphone cradle out of a bunch of bananas, continuing the produce theme that comes with with operating from the kitchn work table. Here's the stream! I look forward to seeing if we can capture other statoins one day.