Copasetic Flow

 Project TouCans was featured in the qrper.com field kits column!!! I forgot to mention this when it came out a few months ago, but it's there !The noise issues for TouCans are much improved, and getting better. I'm still learning what should go where, but my learning curve seems to be accelerating a little bit at least. The most recent improvement—as of this afternoon—is that it helps to tape the transceiver to the back of the rain shield. Wireless TouCans enabled me to do something I've never done before. I activate, not one, not two, but three parks in New Mexico last weekend! I activated  US-4551 Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, US-4516 Lincoln National Forest, and finally,  US-7877 Valley of Fires National Recreation Area. (Notice the new US designators in place of the Ks.) From the Organs, my first QSO was with Spain ! Given that I haven't published a 'week notes' in about a month, I should also add that I have a very rudimentary straight...

 Project TouCans has been flying with its power source onboard for several months. It occurred to me I've never documented the power system in its entirety. The Battery The foundation of the power system is an Imuto potable laptop charger Using this charger as a power supply for TouCans has two advantages. First, it fits in a Progresso soup can, so it fits the form factor of the rig that's more often than not flying suspended in its own dipole antenna. Second, it has two USB-C ports. One is attached directly to a USB-C power deliver breakout board that then feeds the the latching relay that serves as the on/off switch for the rig's radio and amplifier. The other USB-C port sports a short USB-C thunderbolt cable protrudes from the can and allows the battery to be charged without opening TouCan's case. Choosing the Voltage So, we have a supply that provide up to 100 Watts. But at what voltage? That's what this gadget , an Adafruit HUSB238, determines. It's jumper...

 I mentioned the CWops scholarship yesterday beacuse I was looking at their site for an entirely different reason. The (seemingly?) old saw of whether or not to call /QRP as in KD0FNR/QRP had come up again in a ham radio forum. This time, the converstation on GQRP revolved around whether or not the /QRP designator should be removed from RBN calls. Someone remarked that /QRP might already be filtered on the RBN. I tired this morning wiwth Project TouCans. /QRP is still very much a thing on the RBN. I'm trying to understand what all the fuss is about. So, if you have clarifying remarks, or even an opinion, please comment!  Here's what I've got so far: The people that feel you shouldn't do it feel very strongly that you shouldn't do that. Also, the people that feel very strongly about it seem to only mention it in regards to DX pileups.My fifteen minutes of internet ham radio research led to a SOTA forum post where some (one?) ops revealed they would never respond ...

 We pushed the teletype prototype for Project TouCans further today! KO6BTY transmitted a CQ call on 2 meters, and I managed to decode it—at least semi-successfully—through audio from my K6 UVK5(8). It’s not perfect yet, but it’s another good sign that Project TouCans’ RTTY experiment is working. For those that don't remember, or weren't follwing along, I started workign on the possibility of teletype using Project TouCans back in May . I didn't have the time to add a frequency change relay and possibly a different internal keyer to TouCan's Rockmite, so I settled on converting the microPython code intended for TouCans into JavaScript that could be run on the blog using GPT. It worked. I knew this right away becasue DroidRTTY decoded the audio output of the blog page app. Meanwhile, CW on 2 meters has become kinda popular lately thanks to  KI7QCF . My mind put the two topics together today, and voila! Here's a video that explains it all. The semi-successful deco...

 I've alluded to Project TouCans over the last several posts, but I've yet to introduce it. Today is the day! Project TouCans is the new, very compact, packaging of the RockMite  20 with an attached TunaTopper amplifier suspended in a halfwave dipole antenna. Here's the design drawing Diaze and I made In short, both components are suspended from the top of a pineapple can. The tuna-sized can the Tuna Topper shipped in is flipped over and used as a rain cover and antenna mounting structure. The antenna is mounted to the red and black banana plug binding posts at the top of the assembly. You saw a picture of the latest incarnation of TouCans in yesterdays post. Here's the original—and more colorful—project in its first incarnation The Ethernet port is the same one used by the Rockmite in the Flying Rockmite—for that matter, the radio is also the same one used in the most recent flying Rockmite. The first coil of Ethernet cable is attached to the pineapple can using elect...

 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...

 Up until yesterday, Project TouCans required two battery packs, one in the rig itself to power the Rockmite and Tuna Topper amplifier and a much smaller external one to power the Pico-W that controls the rig's keyer and straight key. I tried bringing a USB A cable directly from the Imuto power bank in the rig out to the Pico-W, but the RFI was too much for the Pico-W causing it to reboot, or just turn off. That led to the two or three AA battery battery pack, which frankly was a bit to much extra weight, and a bit unwieldy. Thant's all fixed now! I added as second Adafruit USB-C power adapter to the rig and that provided enough filtering that the Pico-W is happy as long as I make sure the rig doesn't transmit at all until the antenna is completely unfurled, which is a pretty reasonable expectation. When/if the rig does transmit with the antenna bundled up, the Pico-W reboots, then it presses the straight key which upsets the rig, causing the rig to reboot, except on re...

 Oh my goodness, it's been a busy week! We made our triumphant return to WonderCon, finally pulling off a trip we had planned four years ago in 2020. The funny book show at the Anaheim Convention Center is just kinda spectacular. I highly recommend it. It's laid back enough for me, but there's still a lot of things going on. Among other people, we saw Gail Simone, Marv Wolfman, and Steve Orlando all on one panel. During the trip, we got to try out a new bus route, the Metro 206 which goes from near the convention center to downtown LA over the span of about two hours. We'd plan to take Amtrak, but then the train had delays and, as it turned out, even more delays. We did better taking the bus for $1.75 a piece. I was able to play around with what felt like a lot of code in my spare time. I was releived to find that it's still pretty easy for me to set up a one off Datasette plugin. The result was the elevation profile plugin  and template that sprung out of me ri...

 Project TouCans made 52 QSOs in well under 24 hours while the gang (12 year-old Diaze, 10 year-old Mota, and 8 year-old Tawnse; all internet monikers), and I were camping in Cibola National Forest above Mountainair, NM. That's more QSOs than we've ever done in a POTA before! That's also more QSOs than we've ever had in a 24 hour period before! Project TouCans is working great!!! Here's a map of all the QSOs. On top of everything else, Project TouCans was spotted by two European RBN stations. That's never happened before. No European QSOs (that has happened before ... more than once ... before the tuna topper amp of Project TouCans), but still!

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 spent a lot of time this week working on getting radio frequency interference from the rig itself and the Pico-W that controls Project TouCans out of the audio output. Some of this work was not fruitful. Turns out the audio wiring does not belong in Project TouCans no matter how much the Pico-W may induce helicopter blade audio overtones in the rig's headphone routing. Some of the work, however, not only removed the helicopter noise, it was a simple patch, like scissors and tape and cardstock simple. Please allow me to introduce the cigar box Pico-W Noise Suppressor. At present, the Pico-W rides atop the heavy duty opto-isolated relays that it uses to control Project TouCans internal keyer. As it turns out, the helicopter noise was being coupled into the audio output through these relays. Bear with me, there are a combination of audio issues that I'm optimizing for here. It's kind of like the old lady that ate a fly story. Audio ground needs to be routed through the sa...

 When I started down the road of putting a Raspberry Pico-W in charge of the Morse code key and on/off switch on our 20 meter rock-locked, QRP CW rig, Project TouCans, last year, I came across many, many microPython code examples where the entire point was to WiFi connect your Pico-W to your home router and then access it from other devices.  KO6BTY and I however, mostly use Project TouCans while out camping for POTA/SOTA. Consequently, the 'home router' route, (pun intended), didn't seem helpful. Ultimately, I found code example for setting up a Pico-W as a network as an access point as opposed to a client. That worked. We were able to WiFi connect a laptop to Project TouCans to turn the rig on and off and send either auto-keyed or straight key CW . It did however, lock whichever device into TouCans exclusively. That wasn't too big of a problem though, because I could make POTA self-spots and check out our signal on various SDRs using my smart phone. Then, yesterday, a...

 Note: The following will probably change over time, and is not ready for primetime. It's in the nature of a lab book entry so that I don't lose information about changes to Project TouCans.  I dodged a lot of near disasters this weekend by waiting to make sure I understood what was going on before acting.  The day before what I'm going to detail here, the Pico-W that's been in in outdoor service on TouCans for just over a year gave out. It was the curse of the Butterfield Overland Trail. I may never activate that park here in San Francisco. Not only do I not make many QSOs at the locations I've tried, the rig also tends to become damaged in one way or another. This time, the Pico-W jsut wouldn't boot after I got home. It also wouldn't respond to a direct USB connection anymore. When I replaced the Pico-W, I thought we'd done a better job of revision controlling our code than we had. I loaded code onto the new Pico-W, and nothing! I assumed the Darlingto...

The QSL cards for Project TouCans first POTA have gone out, so now I can talk about them online without any spoilers and—hopefully—a few clarifications and elucidations. First, this was Project TouCans first POTA , so it was kind of a big deal to the (12, 10, and 8 year-old)gang and I. It became even a bigger deal because TouCans managed to do—in a single outing, no less—something the Flying Rockmite hadn't been able to do in two different POTAs to the same site; namely, to breach the Golden Gate Bridge with a QSO! In our previous two attempts, all of our QSOs avoided the center span of the bridge leading us to hypothesize about the number of 20 meter wavelengths that might fit into the bridge span, the height of the bridge above the water and whatnot. Here's a look at the QSOS from our cliff-side perch during the Flying Rockmite outings. And here's roughly the same view with Project TouCans! Notice the green (I've added RST color coding to our mapping app since the fi...

 When we talk about wireless we usually mean propagation. But what if a ham radio didn't even have a feed line!? Project TouCans has done exactly that! If you're new here, the goal of Project TouCans has always been to have a simple, (I know, it doesn't look simple at the moment), radio that alleviates the operator from needing to think about feelines and SWRs. (Becuase I'm the operator and I don't like thinking about those sorts of things.) The first, very fruitful, year long iteration of this was to move the radio into the antenna. The rig still had wires descending to the ground for the keyer controls, power, and audio though. They all traveled along an Ethernet cable terminated in an RJ-45 jack at either end. There was RFI. It was not as cool as it could have been. Over the last two weeks KO6BTY and I finally accomplished our ultimate goal: We got rid of the Ethernet cable!!! A week and a half ago, we rid ourselves of the need for keyer wires by adding a Pico-W...

 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 ...