Copasetic Flow

 I filed my first issue on the Google Earth Forum today. In the new version, the controls that enable the gang and I to tilt the map to look at HF propagation around land forms are missing. Hopefully they'll come back, or I'll learn where they've been hidden.

  Squigily audio in our homebrew ham radio rig? Capacitors! This extends the capacitor post from last week. This week, while adjusting the Tuna Topper amplifier bias after a run-in we had with an unexpected rain shower, I put capacitors across the dit and day switches on the keyer. The dit capacitor was particularly useful because with the amplifier bias set above a certain level, the keyer chip would immediately reboot when the dit key was pushed. I'm assuming RFI transients were punching through to the little processor, befuddling it in the process. Today, the kid—Diaze—and I changed the battery from a D cell pack to a LiFePO4 battery. The extra bit of punch provided by the nicer battery meant we had to turn down the bias on the TunaTopper's onboard pot just another quarter turn or so. The resulting keying sidetone over the headphones was less than esthetically pleasing though. When Diaze sat down to key out a CQ, the buzzing and squiggly sounds were too much for her. A rec...

 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...

 The ionosphere at 5 AM in San Francisco wasn't set up to support long range communications, but I did get a pretty picture of the rig as Venus was rising behind it. The radio/amp pair reached across the Bay to both the Berkeley stations— W6BB and NU6XB — and nowhere else. References: The Ionosphere this morning Project TouCans RBN

 Had I set the power amplifying transistor's bias high enough, or did the radio always work this way with the amp? It's good to have data!  I've been collecting reverse beacon spots and QSO data since around the start of this year . The reverse beacon data is collected automatically, inspired by a productivity and documentation talk by Simon Willison. Last night, rain got into the Project Toucans radio. It's not waterproof enough yet, I guess. Turns out there are whole issues in using Tuna and fruit cans as radio cases that I'd never thought through. The lid is corrugated making it difficult to seal holes against water. Anyway... Earlier this evening, I had the radio/amplifier combination back up and running, but were they running well enough? Fortunately I had data for that. I queried the data using datasette . I asked about reverse beacon spots since the amplifier was added into the station mix a few days back: select rowid, id, tx_lng, tx_lat, rx_lng, rx_lat, ...

 OK, so this isn't so much one I learned, as one I remembered, and then empirically proved. Did you know that human thumbs are capacitative—as in they act like capacitors? Yup! They are! The project TouCans Rockmite/ TunaTopper stack suffers from the same issue the Flying Rockmite often did. Sometimes, the RFI from the antenna gets to be too much, and the memory keyer decides to stop keying out its memory. I noticed that when using the keyer with Project TouCans, if I put my thumb across the leads to the 'dah' keyer switch, the issue went away and the memory keyer ditted and dahed along to completion. I had brought a small capacitor out to the radio site to try placing across the headphone leads to solve an AM pickup problem inherent with having 25 foot long headphone wires. The same issue on a far lesser scale had been solved by Mark— N6MTS —as part of his work on the Open Headset Interconnect Standard, OHIS . The cap hadn't down the job for the Flying Rockmite or Pr...

 I've been doing a lot of amplifier testing over the last week with the Tuna Topper as part of what has become Project TouCans. It's led to many more QSOs—meaning, more than one per week—from the house. I maybe haven't remembered to log them all, and so I wasn't too surprised when I saw that  N2AKJ had logged a Parks on the Air, ( POTA ), contact with me last Thursday when they activated K-2114 Nissequogue River State Park . Still, since I didn't remember the QSO, I wanted to make sure I was at least on the air. And.... There's an app for that! Using the RBN network data automatically accumulated by rm-rbn-history about QSOs and RBN spots from my callsign—KD0FNR— served through datasette , I was able to determine if I'd been on the air when the QSO was logged. Spoiler alert: I was. Understanding the SQL formatting to get the information was a bit tricky, so I'm documenting the SQL statement here so I can go back to it later. select rowid, id, tx_lng,...