Copasetic Flow

Powered TouCans made its first QSO today. The operator on the other end was K8IIJ north of San Diego, CA. Rather fittingly it was a QRP to QRP QSO!  KO6BTY had the idea to power the Raspberry Pi Pico-W from the same Imuto battery bank as well. We'd abandoned this idea early on in the prototype stages of the keyer because RFI on the battery return line from the rig would flumox things about 7 characters into a CQ call. I thought we might have better luck now that the battery line's only six inches long. We had different luck. In this incarnation, the Pico is unable to make WiFi connections when powered by the brick, so back to the 2 AAs we went. In other news, the rig survived its first unintentional drop test this morning! The cranky antenna connector acted up again. This time, the bolt simply stripped away from the threads dropping the rig ten feet to the ground. The Bluetooth audio transmitter popped its stereo cable on both ends, but that was the extent of the damage! The ri...

 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...

 Hey Everyone! It snowed! The ham radio was awesome though! Project TouCans was spotted in England, and made three QSOs into Europe about about 4 AM in the morning in New Mexico! Here's TouCans braving the winter storm. It's low in the center of the picture in it's coffee bag rain/snow shield. The white streaks are the camera picking up rather rapidly falling snow flakes. Unbeknownst to me, the rental car that KO6BTY and I had picked up the night before was very, very much not a 4WD SUV. Just two, and not a good two at that. We'd checked the weather three times on the way up the mountain the day before, and snow was not in the forecast. When I woke up t midnight to a gentle pattering on the top of the tent, since it was a bit warmer, I assumed the pattering was rain. It wasn't. It was snow. A thin layer of snow on the rain fly will actually serve as insulation, warming the tent a bit. Oh boy. As an aside, Tawnse, the youngest of the gang ( now 9 ) and I had a simila...

Tracking down a mapping bug led me to watch clouds on Google Earth and after yesterday's snow storm—more on that later—I suddenly found myself scraping weather radar data to layer on top of the K-4514 POTA site KO6BTY camped at on Friday night. Here's the map of the POTA activation/camping trip that started on a clear evening, became a dusting of snow, and then became more snow than the rental car could handle: That's the camping site/radio station there at the pink x. The not quite beautifully formatted time in the upper left-hand corner is UTC time starting at midnight at the camp site. As you can see, the snow started, thought it might give up, and then resumed with gusto. I'll talk about that on my activation report. Here's the cool thing though! I've mostly automated the creation of radar weather maps for a given POTA activation site!  Here's how: The Source Data: I'm scraping nexrad data from this site. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/radar/ I learn...

 Just a quick update New keyer chip installed last night after blowing out the old one on an SOTA outing This morning, reattached antenna to tuna can mounts (inside) again Moved to coffee bag rain shield

 On a far less math-heavy jaunt, I finally got around to trying to figure out how fast the auto-keyer KO6BTy and I put togehter could send CW. For the moment, the keyer's record is 31 WPM without errors. I can't key that fast, so I'm going to go ahead and declare that fast enough!

 OK, let's maybe wrap this up. Spoiler: I developed more cool new stuff, but didn't wrap this up. Recap: I set out to see what it would take to map the skips for a QSO, and then try to extrapolate those back to the launch angle of the dipole that KO6BTY and I use for Project TouCans  at our home QTH . Along the way, I learned a lot including another use for the cross product. I also remembered, just now, that dipoles can have more than one launch angle. Taken from Radio Antenna Engineering That'll be important later. Today, as promised, I tried the three skip solution. Here's the angle of radiation from the SF station with three skips. But what's the numeric quantity for the angle in degrees? Well, I worked through yet more math. It's getting easier though. I added the code for the cross product of two vectors (position vectors in our case) as well as the usage I'm making of the cosine and sine laws to to earthmid.py . The numeric result of three skips is 7...