Copasetic Flow

 KO6BTY and I took Project TouCans up to Mt. Davidson this morning. We did not activate the summit. We did manager a QSO with K6EL before the keyer may have given out. (We're going to test it here in a bit.) What we did find out is that the imuto charging brick we're using can tune between two really loud radio stations that are presumably both broadcasting from nearby Sutro Tower. With the power cable plugged into the 100 Watt jack, we received the local sports station. With it plugged into the 60 Watt jack, we get music instead. Update: We did in fact lose a keyer chip. When I tried to rub-start the radio, I accidentally touched the power wire to the keyer chip programming input terminal. After that, the keyer chip was forever convinced that I was holding down the programming button. I had planned for this kind of thing—it's happened before—so I had a replacement on hand back at the house.

 Project TouCans can be powered by USB-C! I've been wanting to try this since I learned that there are boards that can be connected to USB-C power supplies that can request different voltages and currents and—if successful—then power a ham radio at that voltage. Today, Project TouCans made it's first ever USB-C powered QSOs! I used a board I purchased at Adafruit. The easiest way to select a voltage and/or current is to solder bridge jumpers and/or scalpel the default jumpers. Beware though, if your input power supply can't handle either your voltage or current request, you'll wind up at the next lowest voltage down the scale that the supply  can support. So, for example, when I broke the default current jumper to ask for 3 Amperes, I went from a happy 15 V supply down to a a 5 V supply, because my laptop charger will not/cannot support 3 amps at 15 volts. I wasn't sure the green board RockMite that makes up half of Project TouCans could support a 15 V supply becau...

 I did not think Project TouCans would make a single QSO in the ARRL Sweepstakes. I was wrong. When all was said and done, the little rig housed in the dipole in our backyard in San Francisco made 17 QSOs whilel working the contest for about three and a quarter hours. One of the QSOs was even to New Hampshire, one of the dwindling number of states the gang and I haven't contacted yet! The rig did great, lots of people were able to hear it. The thing that struck me as being really, really nice of everyone was that while I don't think calling /6QRP made anyone any more interested in calling, it did seem to open up a space on the QRP frequencies. The screenshot below shows the hole that Project TouCan's two available frequencies, 14057.5 and 14058 kHz, fit right into. I used the Utah SDR as a waterfall display for the Project TouCans receiver. It's a RockMite which means that it's really, really wide, and, of course, there were a lot of really loud stations to either s...

 What a nice afternoon! The F2 over San Francisco decided it was ready to go! Five QSOs from the house on 4 W in just a few hours. Project TouCans finally reached into Wyoming, a state we've been mysteriously up until now. Also? I talked with someone on an Elecraft KH1. I'd hear a lot about the rig this week. It was really cool to get to talk to one so soon! TouCans made five QSOs during the afternoon into the early evening. Here's a look at the QSO map .

 I finally got csvs-to-sqlite to work on the Windows machine here! You might remember that the 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang and I had been unable to coerce the utility into working. That was OK because with our workarounds, we could use it on Github Codespaces, so we were still up and running an instance of Datasette that served our ham radio QSOs. It was also really ok, because with the experience we gained, when one of the gang saw a OneSchema hiring banner hanging in a window overlooking the alley where our favorite pub is located, they immediately knew what the company did, and made sure to point it to me. This led to us checking out their website, and discussing even more of the vagaries of csv files and jobs in the tech industry over our lunch. Unschooling works! Today, I found a way! First, I re-read my original post . I changed our pandas install back to 1.5.0 as the post instructs. I got further. The utility errored out because it was upset about the number of columns na...

 Just a quick note that the QRP ham radio rig, Project TouCans, was spotted on the RBN network this morning in New Zealand! Off to the West spots and contacts always amaze me even a little more because the rig, suspended in its half wave dipole antenna is about five feet below the lip of a hill directly to the west.

The latest fun engineering problem in ham radio Project TouCans! There's an unhappy capacitor lurking somewhere! I've realized that what I thought was a water intrusion issue is not. It actually appears to be stray capacitance, but where? And is it even stray capacitance? The main, bad symptom Immediately after charging the battery, the radio when hooked up to the new charged brute merely buzzes. The magic fix There's one way around this that works somewhat reliably, and that's to do what's called a 'battery terminal rub start'. This entails the following Attach the radio to the keyer, (which  also sends p9ower up to the radio in the antenna) by plugging its Ethernet cable in. The batter is disconnected at this state. Attach the keyer's negative terminal wire to the negative battery terminal Do not attach the radio's positive terminal wire to the battery. Intead: Rub the edge of the keyer's terminal wire on the gnurled surface of the positive bat...