Copasetic Flow

 The rig is back up and running. I made two QSOs last night from the home QTH with a lot  of noise! They were to KA6JLT in Reno, NV and and WN1Z in Susanville, CA from here in San Francisco. This time, we did not measure the power out of Project TouCans. I suspect our several decades old Radio Shack power meter has given up the ghost, or there's something wonky in one of the cheapo connectors from Amazon. As a side note, the radio is much quieter and works better when the RF output leads are soldered directly to the banana binding posts at the top of the rig that the antenna attaches to. Side, side note. KO6BTY and I need to keep a slightly cleaner workbench. The rig sparked and vaporized a stray shred of wire yesterday once when we powered it up. Project TouCans Workbench Project TouCans Flies Again

 Reading up on the Tuna Topper and funding for amateur radio projects Since we're now blowing FETs on Project TouCans, and KO6BTY and I are giving a presentation about the rig to the San Francisco Amateur Radio Club on Friday , I've been reading up on amplifier theory. I really like this article explaining how the different classes of amplifiers work except for the horribly gendered  first paragraph. In other reading news, (it's finals week for KO6BTY and I'm getting ready for our camping trip, so mostly all I've had time to do over the last few days is read), Simon Willison pointed out that the Amateur Radio Digital Communications group has grants for advancing the usage and technology of amateur radio. Here are some examples of what's been funded. And finally, here's a link to the article that taught me how to increase power output on the Tuna Topper by upping the bias voltage. It's an even more cool article now that I know how the calls A Tuna Top...

Or, how I learned to miss hard resetting RFI. Up until about a week and a half ago, Project TouCans and the Flying Rockmite before it had never blown a final amplifier transistor. Our good fortune with transistors was caused in large part not by any particular genius in the construction or handling of the radio, but almost entirely to radio frequency interference. When too much RF energy was reflected back into the radio on key down, the Rockmite's picokeyer would reset chirping out an only slightly irritated 73 in Morse code. Hence, we couldn't use the rig, hence we changed the antenna or repaired the rig, or turned down the bias voltage on the Tuna Topper final until we could use the rig without resetting that little keyer. Then! Then we did something that was both cool and, (we'd later find out), somewhat daunting. We removed the last of the wires that attached Project TouCans to the Earth and our RFI just went away. Which has been great for signal quality, and as it tu...

 KO6BTY and I attended office hours with Simon Willison yesterday. At the very end of our call, Simon showed us how we could open a czml directly from our localhost Datasette server in Cesium. After about an hour this morning, the video below shows the results. Here's what you're seeing. There's an SQL query in our Datasette instance that grabs only the QSOs from our Cibola National Forest POTA back in March . That query resulted in 9 QSOs shown in the table. Our additional CZML (and now Cesium viewer) plugin creates a CZML map that is loaded into a Cesium Ion viewer at the bottom of the page. I'm not releasing the code that loads up the viewer quite yet because I have to get the access token squirreled away and all that good stuff. Meanwhile the CZML plugin has been released for a few days now. By the way, we need a way to pull adif files from POTA activations into Datasette. Keep an eye out :)

 I completed the first prototype of my CZML QSO mapping template for Datasette yesterday. So far, I've implemented animation by using the interval property in CZML. Intervals can be attached to any (?) other tag it seems. I had to intuit what to do on a large degree based on the documentation. { "id" : "myObject" , "someProperty" : [ { "interval" : "2012-04-30T12:00:00Z/13:00:00Z" , "number" : 5 } , { "interval" : "2012-04-30T13:00:00Z/14:00:00Z" , "number" : 6 } , ] } I used CZML polylines to display each QSO. Each polyline has a show property. I attached an interval to each QSO of one minute, like so: . "id":"ea1ec", "name":"ea1ec", "polyline":{ "positions":{ "cartographicDegrees":[-106.55691216...

 A single path animation is up and running! The animation can be seen here . But wait! There's more! I now have a template that creates an entire animation: Want to explore it on your own! Please do : I'll have more details soon. For now, here's the template . Check out the sun going down over the Organs as the POTA progresses! So Cool!!!  NOTE: If you're on a cell phone, first zoom the globe in until you can't see the edges of the Earth. At that point, the terrain should become visible. It appears to be a Cesium issue, but it's easily worked around.

 I had a little time to play with a new mapping app over the weekend! This one is from Cesium and in its native form uses a JSON derivative called CZML. CZML is similar to KML. Furthermore, while it won't animate kml for me (at least not yet), CZML looks like it will support timestamps and animation. So! Maybe there'll be a new plugin for the logging program this week. Also! The resulting maps are shareable ! And perhaps can be shown in an iframe