Copasetic Flow

The humble SA612 mixer chip , long a cornerstone of QRP and RockMite transceiver designs, has officially gone end-of-life. Announced by Bill Meara on Soldersmoke, the news marks the close of an era in home-built HF radios. KO6BTY and I have relied on this little chip throughout Project TouCans, and while it’s never failed us in the field, its retirement feels like losing a trusted bandmate. 

 I’ve just launched the new Extra Class Practice Exam site, and it’s officially the first app running on the new Project TouCans platform! The exams follow the same familiar format as the ones here on the blog — but with a major upgrade. Now, when you’re stuck on a question, you can click “AI Help” to start a ChatGPT-powered tutoring session for that specific problem. You can try the exams here: 👉 https://projecttoucans.com/

 At the moment, I have the experimental, Open AI ChatKit enabled ham radio practice exams flying blind: I'm not passing the figures for exam questions into the AI when the student asks a question. This has led to a really cool thing! The AI is asking students to tell them what they see.  The question: includes a schematic of a linear voltage regulator. Here's the thing though, the AI system doesn't know that, it's just passed the question along with the correct answer at this point in development.  See that question at the bottom? "Now, could you describe or summarize what components or features you see in Figure E7-2?" That's super-cool, I think. The LLM asked because it does not have the picture availble to it. I responded  that I sawa Zener diode attached to the gate of a transistor, and it was off and running explaining to me how linear voltage regulators function and what the zener diode was for. What About Usage Costs? So far, I've taken three ...

Ever tune across the HF bands and wonder just how many Morse code operators are on the air at that moment? Thanks to WW5TH’s ingenious setup that reads directly from the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN), you can see it in near real time. The RBN ’s worldwide network of “skimmers” automatically decodes CW signals, giving a fascinating snapshot of CW activity across the globe.  Pat wrote the code up here and you can find the latest data here . Here's an example from this morning. This quick visualization from W5WTH shows how data from the Reverse Beacon Network can reveal real-time CW activity. It’s a great way to see where the bands are hopping and how propagation changes minute by minute. Check out Pat’s GitHub for code details, and watch the data to spot when Morse action is hopping. Want to dive deeper? Try building your own CW dashboard from RBN data using Chat GPT , or explore similar projects in ReverseBeacon.net and Parks on the Air to see who...

 Project TouCans just got a major database upgrade! The QSO records that KO6BTY and I log from field activations can now be appended directly from our GitHub CSV files instead of regenerating the entire SQLite database. This new method—based on an approach I first saw in Simon Willison’s video—keeps local data editable while automatically merging in the latest contacts from the cloud.

 Everything’s moving fast in AI again! Yesterday, OpenAI announced the ChatGPT Apps SDK, a framework that lets developers build full-featured web apps right inside ChatGPT. For Project TouCans, that’s a huge step forward. Just last month, I built two prototypes of the AI-enabled Ham Radio Practice Exam—one running Python inside GPT-5’s Code Interpreter, and another in a JavaScript canvas embedded within ChatGPT. Back then, those two couldn’t talk to each other. Now, with the new Apps SDK, they finally can—and that means real-time, interactive AI help during exams is finally within reach. You can try out the latest version of the extra class practice exam here (sans the Apps SKD so far.)

  Extra Class Practice Exam Free AI enabled (no key required) exams are now available: extra tech Get ready for the FCC Extra Class license exam with this free online ham radio practice test. Our interactive exam tool uses the official FCC Element 4 Question Pool (valid July 2024–2028) and automatically tracks your performance. See your score history, review stacked bar charts of correct vs wrong answers by subelement, and drill down into specific group stats with a single click. This version of the exam is identical to the first release with a single exception. This version has an AI help facility. To see a demo of how to us it, please see this post and associated video. To use the AI features, you'll need to have your own OpenAI API key. You'll input that in a dialog that is not visible to anyone but your browser. One of the points of these exam practice pages was to demonstrate that they could be deployed without needing server-side code, and they don't. This is the f...