Copasetic Flow

 I finally got csvs-to-sqlite to work on the Windows machine here! You might remember that the 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang and I had been unable to coerce the utility into working. That was OK because with our workarounds, we could use it on Github Codespaces, so we were still up and running an instance of Datasette that served our ham radio QSOs. It was also really ok, because with the experience we gained, when one of the gang saw a OneSchema hiring banner hanging in a window overlooking the alley where our favorite pub is located, they immediately knew what the company did, and made sure to point it to me. This led to us checking out their website, and discussing even more of the vagaries of csv files and jobs in the tech industry over our lunch. Unschooling works! Today, I found a way! First, I re-read my original post . I changed our pandas install back to 1.5.0 as the post instructs. I got further. The utility errored out because it was upset about the number of columns na...

 Just a quick note that the QRP ham radio rig, Project TouCans, was spotted on the RBN network this morning in New Zealand! Off to the West spots and contacts always amaze me even a little more because the rig, suspended in its half wave dipole antenna is about five feet below the lip of a hill directly to the west.

The latest fun engineering problem in ham radio Project TouCans! There's an unhappy capacitor lurking somewhere! I've realized that what I thought was a water intrusion issue is not. It actually appears to be stray capacitance, but where? And is it even stray capacitance? The main, bad symptom Immediately after charging the battery, the radio when hooked up to the new charged brute merely buzzes. The magic fix There's one way around this that works somewhat reliably, and that's to do what's called a 'battery terminal rub start'. This entails the following Attach the radio to the keyer, (which  also sends p9ower up to the radio in the antenna) by plugging its Ethernet cable in. The batter is disconnected at this state. Attach the keyer's negative terminal wire to the negative battery terminal Do not attach the radio's positive terminal wire to the battery. Intead: Rub the edge of the keyer's terminal wire on the gnurled surface of the positive bat...

 Yesterday I used Datasette to make a map of the QSOs I'd made from the Pantoll Campground area, Then, I remembered that I also wanted to know how the locations of the stations on the receiving end of my POTA QSOs from there compared to W6CSN's . That map turned out to be very easy to make. I remembered that the Datasette cluster map looks for the column names 'longitude' and 'latitude'. Keeping that in mind, I renamed the columns that I'd use datasette-leaflet-freedraw to search for to 'longitude_t' and 'latitude_t', and then added two more columns containing the latitude and longitude of the receiving station. So,  select rm_rnb_history_pres.tx_lng as longitude , rm_rnb_history_pres.tx_lat as latitude, rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp, rm_rnb_history_pres.dB, rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter, rm_rnb_history_pres.QSL_link, photo_path.path, photo_path.uuid, json_object( 'image', '/-/media/thumbnail/' || uuid, 'title', Spotter...

 Reading W6CSN's post on his recent POTA at Mt. Tamlpais got me thinking. How many QSOs had I made from the region, and had I sent out QSLs for all of them, and had I updated our log database to reflect those QSLs? We have a mapable QSO log, so clearly, I could just zoom in and out on the map, but I wanted to do something that felt fancier. I remembered a Simon Willison  blog  posts about Datasette mentioning there was a plugin that allowed querying of databases based on regions drawn on a map. That's the thing I wanted. Actually Doing the Thing So, I wanted to be able to display a map,  draw a region on the map, and then review the QSOs I'd made from that region. Armed with a map of QSOs, I also wanted to be able to click each QSO to see if I'd updated the QSL photo for the occasion in our QSO database.  After working though the issues I discuss below, I was delighted to be able to search for our QSOs from the Pantoll Campground Region like so: Now that we've s...

 The kid passed her technician radio exam at UC Berkeley last night!!! She built most of the Tuna Topper amplifier in Project TouCans and now she can get on the air soon! (Not on that rig since it's in 20 meters, a non-Technician band), but she's looking to fix that two different ways. She wants to get to work building a radio of her own, and she's going to take the general class exam again next month!

 I've run into issues of late with the keyer on the Rockmite inside of Project TouCans rebooting as the output power of the amp was increased via increases in the final transistor's bias current. Simply put, after a certain power level, the keyer would spontaneously reboot when the 'dit' key was pressed. In keeping with our more is less theme, our key is homemade. I wrote an article about it that appeared in Sprat 195 this year! The homebrew nature of the keyer meant there were lots of possible root causes for what I was observing. Here's the radio's view of the mechanical portion of the keyer. The switch on the lower left is the one that was was causing resets. Here's a view of the whole rig, battery (since replaced by a LiFePO4 of the same size), keyer, and Project TouCans mounted in the antenna over the backyard. The key switch that caused resets is mounted on the right hand side of the keyer from this angle. The switch on top is the keyer programming bu...