Copasetic Flow

 Slowly but surely, KO6BTY, Tawnse and I are making our way back to the West Coast. Last night, we stopped in Quincy, MA for the flight we thought we were going to take this morning... It looks like we are gonna call the East Coast our headquarters for a few more days, This has however, opened up POTA opportunities. Last night, I had the chance to activate Saint Pope John Paul II Park, US-8422 , in Boston just across the Neponset River from where were staying in Quincy. The park is relatively new. It was opened to the public in 2001 and commemorates the Pope’s visit to Boston in 1979. It was constructed on the site of a landfill and a drive-in movie theatre. Setting up near the river turned out to be a wash. The park is arranged so there is fairly thick vegetation between park denizens and the river. I did, however get to set up about 10 yards back from the river in a pleasant little copse of trees.  First though, I had to get the spools of twine up into the trees. For that, ...

  The weather finally started to cool down a bit the day before LosterCon started. We had plenty of sun, but it wasn’t baking hot.  The campground, where LobsterCon was held, Thomas Point Beach and Campground, was clean and well appointed, maybe too clean. There were no rocks laying about that would fit in the end of the tarred twine spools, so we wound up launching the antenna using pine cone stoppers. We had plenty of nice, flat ground for our two tents, and managed to get Project TouCans about 20 ft up between a pair of pine trees. TouCans made two QSOs during LobstserCon, but the really nice part was all the in-person QSOs getting to hang out with everyone.  KO6BTY and Tawnse diagrammed TouCans on the nearby beach the first evening. Later that night, the rig reached KF9VV in Wisconsin.  The night after that, I made a short DX QSO with M7LLS. Then, we had lobster! So much lobster! During the flea market, we got to check out new and old kits from W1REX of QRPMe . ...

TouCans is back up and running! The culprit did in fact lie in the path between the power supply and ground in the PA chain. I didn’t see it coming though. Here’s the problem: There was a cold solder joint on one side of the inductor. When KO6BTY and I measured the resistance across the inductor, it was infinite. When we remarked about this, 9 year-old Tawnse immediately said, that’s not what inductors are supposed to do. And yeah, she’ right. They’ supposed to conduct at DC. Anyway, a few minutes later, we’d gone from this Notice the magnet wire tint to the two wires whose solder joints are completely in the picture? To this      Which, in turn, led to this later that evening. The moral of the story for me? Always check the two terminal component first because they’re the easiest to fix.     

 We headed from Boston down to Philadelphia. Yeah, I know, that's no way to get to Maine, but when my partner and I were doing grad studies at Brookhaven on Long Island, Phillie was one of our favorite hangouts, so here we are! With all the mapping Cesium has enabled of late, we were pretty tickled to get to visit their headquarters here in town. We got to demo our mapping tool that works with Datasette, and then got to ask questions about Cesium as well. Turns out the small object we frequently notice on the horizon is the Moon! From there, we headed to Isgro near Christian and 10th. Armed with delicious pastries, we wandered up and down 9th St. checking all the other delicious things! A few hours later, Paesano's became our favorite place in town for pasta. We've had lunch there twice now, and just, oh my gosh, the food is so good! Another day, a little further down 9th St., we found $5 cooked crabs and demolished them! I didn't understand why they asked if we wanted...

We're on the East Coast! KO6BTY, myself, and the 9 year-old, (known on the internets as Tawnse), flew out to Boston from San Francisco yesterday. We walked out of the airport to the ferry terminal! That's so cool! You can walk to a ferry from the airport. But do you know what we did then? We didn't take a ferry, we took a water taxi to a different ferry terminal! So many cool things already! Here's the view from the water taxi. We landed at Rowes Wharf which seems to be one of the fanciest wharf's in Boston, so.. yeah. From there we caught the ferry southeast to Hingham  and from there made it to our camp site at Wompatuck State Park. We're now making our war around via public transit taking the T back in to Boston South Station to catch a train from South Station into Philadelphia. Meanwhile! KO6BTY and I have had Cesium maps built into our QSO log for a few months now—ever since the day Simon Wilison nonchalantly pointed out that Datasette queries are URLs i...

 KO6BTY took over debug implementation last night. She wired the RF out from the Rockmite directly to Project TouCans antenna out and... Nothing. Looking at the schematic , that leaves a few choices for what's going on. My favorite for the moment, because it's easy, and because the part is actually very bent, is the T/R switch transistor: The transistor is a 2N7000  MOSFET. Wikipedia lists its maximum current as 200 mA and I can see where we could have exceed that when the Rockmite was shaking loose in TouCans (several of the nylon spacers sheered after a fall.) Also, keep in mind that the power bump has more current traveling through this part of the circuit in any event. After that, we'll be looking at whether or not the oscillator is still oscillating. But actually! Good news! If the oscillator weren't oscillating, the receive branch also wouldn't work, and it most certainly is working!

Since we returned from camping, Project TouCans has been pretty much off the air. We still have receive, a keyer, and a sidetone, but the rig just isn't transmitting. Last week I thought the issue might be the output transistor of the RockMite. It is not. I removed the original transistor, replaced it with a new one, and to no avail! Here's the before And after There was no change in the operation of the rig. No signals were spotted by the RBN or either of the Utah or Half Moon Bay SDRs.