Copasetic Flow

 The (newly) three quarter watt Rockmite ham radio reached Hungary from Great Basin National Park a few days ago! Maui relayed the receive side from Hungary. A few days ago, a POTA outing from Great Basin National Park ( K-0032 ) had kind of petered out. I listened for the RockMite on the Maui software defined radio , SDR, because—for whatever reason—I can usually find the 20 meter output of the RockMite there during the day whether I'm operating from San Francisco or Great Basin. Sure enough, there was the station: But, this time, I heard another station as I listened. And! They were calling me! A bit more listening revealed that it was HA9RE . I answered back on the RockMite, where I could not hear HA9RE, and was immediately rewareded with his answer which I could only hear on the Maui SDR. Here a few more vidoes that detail the contact, the first ever software defined radio relayed contact with the Rockmite! From the IRL point of view: From the SDR point of view: ...

 A fairly gentle hike led to a QSO with Japan at 3/4 watts, and a brand new SOTA ham radio activation. Summit:  W7N/WP-147  8340 Getting there Welp, there's no public transit avilaable to this particular summit, so the gang and I drove.  If you're not from the area, and you're able to, plug in the cooridnates of the peak and let Google plot a route for you. You'll also want to download the offline Google maps for the area; there's plenty of phone signal at the summit, but there are places on the drive in where there’s none at all. Google Maps led us through several forks in the gravel/dirt road to a location just to the south of the summit.  If you stop where we did, you may notice a set of tire tracks that lead most of the way up to the mountain’s central ridge. They make for a nice easy start to the hike. When the tire tracks peter out, you can navigate the rest of the way up on a variety of game trails. My path deposited me on a picturesque saddle in the ridg...

The straight key thing is working out. I'm getting used to it! And today, the first QSO from Great Basin National Park was to Alaska, another first for me and the RockMite! Backing away from the cliff at Great Basin National Park K-0032 also brought in Florida! Notice also that Canada is no longer seeing us! Tomorrow: experiments with reflective cliffs. That's all the news for now! 

Welp, I guess if something was going to give out on the RockMite, being stuck not being able to use a paddle for Morse code wasn't the worst thing. And, it's kinda cool I'm getting to work on my nascent straight keying skills.  Meanwhile I'm continuing to have a blast with our resident cliff face up here at Great Basin National Park. Here's the POTA QSO map from the last time the paddle and memory keyer did work. Notice the cliff is still doing it's thing, but since I moved a bit away from it, the RockMite was able to sneak over the low edge to Texas. Oh! And the radio made it's first forray into California since we arrived in Nevada. Here's the station location:

 I accidentally demonstrated one of the aspects of POTA ham radio that I have the most fun with yesterday: radio geomapping.  Notice how all the QSOs and spots are confined to a, (pretty much), ninety degree quadrant. Well, I made the outing about 10 in the morning when the Rockmite has historically kinda dumpy results, and it was hot so I didn't stay out long, but was that the reason for only making two QSO? Maybe. Was it the cause of the quadrant propagation pattern? Probably not. Zooming in on the map gives My POTA location was nestled right up against a set of cliffs and rock outcroppings. The propagation pattern bore this little secret out perfectly!  Park: Great Basin National Park near Baker, Nevada. K-0032 Getting there, public transit route(s) Radio Details: Power bumped Rockmite, naked radio version, halfwave dipole between a cedar and a conifer.   QSO/ RBN spot map: and on Google Earth where you can squiggle the cliffs around to your heart's co...

 In addition to some interesting ham radio happenings, there were fighter jets and hummingbirds. Stand-alone cameras rock! Park: Mt. Davidson in San Francisco:  W6/NC-423 I used the best-for-me-for-early-morning-transit route I mentioned in my last SOTA report  for this summit. I also used my Google Pixel phone to record the actual slope of the hike up from the bus stop. You might remember that I took umbrage that Google claimed the route was almost flat.  Today, I measured it using the 'degrees off kilter' display on my cell phone. The slope is a wopping 12 degrees. Hardly flat. Here's what the world looks like if you take a picture of the 'mostly flat' sidewalk: Radio Details and Gear: I saw that the  qrper.com  trip reports include a gear list. I hadn't ever thought about it before, so I figured I try it out. Interesting, or no? Radio: A green board Rockmite 20. You can get the red board kit at  QRPMe . Antenna: 12 gauge wire cut to a half-wave dipo...

I found a workaround for providing links to Google Earth web maps. Up until this morning, to share a map with you like the following from Google Earth: I would have had to point you at the associated kml file on Google Drive, and then instructed you to open it by clicking on the 'Projects' menu in Google Earth, then clicking on the 'New Project' button, selecting 'Import KML from Google Drive', and then pointing it at the kml I mentioned above. So, instead, I just linked—embedded actually—shared QSO maps from Google's almosot forgotten—in some circles—but still very functional MyMaps site. Here's the map on MyMaps: Today while I was looking at a map to embed for  my Mt. Davidson SOTA earlier this week, I noticed that there's a link to view the map in Google Earth. I clicked it, and sure enough, the map appeared in Google Earth. I then copied the resulting, final, link into an icognito window, and got back a Google Earth map of the same area, b...