Over the weekend, KOTBTY and I got to spend more time moving the CW key relay inside Project TouCans and adding a power on/off latching relay. As you can hear and see in the video below, the latching relay is up and running! Thanks for Simon Willison for the Claude artifact that enabled me to easily package up the video below.
Ha, that's interesting! It's not so much a video packaging as a video thumbnail tool, which is of course what it said it was. Well, here's the video all bundled up into an iframe ready for your viewing—and listening—pleasure. I'll have to work with the gang on a version of the tool that outputs iframes soon.
What you can see in the video: the Darlington array has two control leads coming into it from the PICO-Ws GPIO 17 and GPIO 18 pins, (the orange and red wires respectively.) Now that we're using a latching relay, we need one control wire to latch the power on and a second wire to latch the power off. Positive rely coil power is attached directly to the latching relay, but the circuit through each coil to ground is broken by the Darlington array. When the Pico-W signals to the Darlington array to conduct for a fraction of the second, the appropriate relay coil, (either power-on or power-off), is energized and then the connection is latched by the internal latching magnets of the relay.
One remotely controllable switch that Project TouCans has been missing is an on/off switch. Once the rig's up in the air, it's powered until we bring it bakc down or the battery goes dead. We're working on changing that. A few weeks ago after reading about Darlington arrays on a ham radio forum message I can no longer locate, we put a plan in place. K06BTY got our twow main comcponents soldered ont a board and we stepped away from the project for a few weeks. We're back and just about ready to go.
Here's what we have now
K06BTY installed our keyer relay dead-bug style using superglue below the single-pole double-throw power relay. We're using the Darlington relay pictured at the top of the column to protect the Pico-W from directly delivering current to the relay coils, an activity that can destroy at least the GPIO portion of the Pico-W, (ask me how I know.)
More updates soon. For step by step progress updates see TouCan's github page for this project.
Project TouCans is rock locked, meaning that it operates on a single frquency: 14057.4 kHz at teh moment. This leads to station operation that looks a bit different from most. Notice that while we do use the RBN, it's mostly as a wellness check for TouCans. For us to call a station, they have to be on frqueqncy, so we also use the tool shown in the terminal window to the left, rbn_telnet.py. We can start it with a signal range such as
python3 rbn_telnet.py -b 14057 -e 14059
The tool then connects to the RBN's telnet feed and filters for only calls between the -b and -e arguments in kHz.
Immediately after getting TouCans back on the air a few days back, I was presented with the opportunity to see a few things about how the rig works and whether or not its antenna angle might be an issue.
W6CSN shared a post about his POTA outing with his KH-1 on the same day. I inquired as to the power he used. He replied that he was running 4 Watts into his EFHW antenna from San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, US-0212.
I have, for a long time, wanted to find out if the Rocky Mountains barrier faced by TouCans during the day is a feature of the rig, the ionospher, or the rig's antenna angle, (sloping down a hill in the backyard.) Based on Matt's QSO report and RBN spots vs. my RBN spots for the day, it looks like the barrier might be an ionosphere thing:
Matt's QSOs on 9/2/2024
Notice the cutoff with no QSOs past Utah and Arizona. That's what I saw during the same day for TouCans on the RBN:
Project TouCans RBN Spots 15:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC
Here, you can see that only one spot made it out as far as as th Kansas/Missouri border. Also note that the rig was spotted at 34 dB, (34 dB into anywhere is a hefty signal for TouCans), in LA which fits with W6CSN remarking about his unusal QSOs to the South.
The ionospheric causation idea holds up looking at W6CSN's RBN spots for the same day 24/09/02:
Of course, as with all things ionosphere and HF, I don't have a conculsive answer, there are too many variables. I'm going to go down a not strictly robust path here and say that the difference in antenna types, (kinda vertical EFHW vs. dipole), and sites, (plain at sea level at San Pablo Bay vs. hillside in SF proper a few miles to the South), make the ionosphere on the 2nd more of a likely culprit for the similar results.
Why was the ionosphere doing the things it did? I don't know yet, but I'll keep you posted.
I mentioned earlier that Project TouCans is back on the air. It's also on the air with a stronger signal than it had two weeks ago. The difference?
That's it! That's the whole thing. Notice that the wire, which is coming apart and needs to be replaced, is wrapped onto the insulator with only about two or three inches of itself. For the last several weeks, I've been wrapping it with between six and seven inches of itself. Going back to the shorter wrap immediately led to more signal! I guess resonant dipole antennas are really resonant!
Project TouCans is back up and running! The rig just stopped dead in its tracks during the NAQCC Sprint a few weeks back, and that was that. After two hours of debug and soldering yesterday, it's back.
A few things of note:
The battere was completely dead. The imuto power supplies TouCans uses hold their charge for weeks, so I'm guessing this was the number one issue. But! The battery didn't do it's usual buck supply hum into the radio, (hence me not realizing it was even close to being out of juice.)
The lack of buck supply hum might have been precipitated by the second issue I found. The audio output wire was severed within its insulation. A DC ohmmeter check indicate that there was an open circuit. I'm wondering though, if the wires were close enough together in the insulation if they weren't capactatively coupled, and therefore still producing sound and providing a bit of a filter. I replaced the wire in question, so we may never know. Here are the spots for the rig so far this morning. No backyard QSOs yet.
The gang and I made our first QSO with Australia this week!
The QSO came bundled with two other DX contacts made with Project TouCans—all in a 16 minute window—which I'll write about soon. Our camping site is nestled below Anvil Mountain to the East and across the Million Dollar Highway from South Mineral Springs, about two miles north of Silverton, CO. We're surrounded by peaks on all sides. Bear Mountain peak is framed in my pictures of the rig.
Project TouCans was probably 20 feet up in its dipole. This turned out to be difficult to show in photographs with the proper perspective. I finally decided to make a gif of different zoom levels of a single photo. The picture below starts out focused on Bear Mountain Peak and then zooms out to include the rig and the ground outside my partner's and my tent.
You can see the Bluetooth transmitter that brings the head phone audio down to the ground hanging from the bottom of the rig.
The campsite is gorgeous and almost completely bug free. I managed to make it out on one hike. Tawnse—the nine year-old—our puppy, and I were treated to views like this
Notice the mountains lurking very nearby in every shot.
That brings us to the circumstances of the QSO with VK3YV, the first DX QSO of that morning. Here's our campsite from a way's out showing the F2 skip path (estimated using real-time data from the Boulder, CO ionosonde), as well as the path of the QSO along the ground.
Zooming in a bit reveals just how many peaks we were surrounded by and shows our location relative to Silverton.
So, with all those mountains in the way, how did we talk to Australia?
Project TouCans threaded the valley to the west of our campsite! Check this out!
I'll leave you with the map of the QSO so you can trace along the path at your leisure. Use the time control in the lower left corner or the slider along the bottom of the map to locate the QSO at 12:40 UTC. From there, you can zoom in and out using a mouse center-button wheel. You can also tilt by holding down the control key, and then moving the map using the left mouse button.
Update
Due to a bug in the ionosonde code that I'd immediately introduced, the F2 layer height was not 307 km as shown in the diagram above. It was in fact, 235 km over Hawaii which had data at the time, (Boulder, CO in fact did not), and which was closer to the middle of the QSO path as well. The difference in F2 height resulted in the first mountain intersection that used to look like this
with the incorrect data looking like this with the new F2 height data
References
Ionosonde Data
This was made possible with data collected by
Reinisch, B. W., and I. A. Galkin, Global ionospheric radio observatory (GIRO), Earth, Planets, and Space, 63, 377-381, doi:10.5047/eps.2011.03.001, 2011.
POTA activation from Silverton in twenty-one minutes!
Project TouCans had one of its highest ever antenna placements.
It showed in the QSO data. Check out the number of 599 reports, (white qso paths.)
(All QSOs are shown with their associated F2 skip paths.)
I'm loving the, (very real), yet very sci-fi look of what's going on with the F2 skips from this rig at this location
Most of the F2 paths actually cleared the mountain, so I didn't have to think about diffraction or other radio optics effects. VE3EID did plow just a little bit into the mountainside
It did come out the other side. (By the way, you can look at all of this on your own in the map below.)
But, if Ontario plowed into a peak a little bit, how did Puerto Rico KP3CW spot the rig?
Turns out, it's line of sight between mountains from here
QSO Map
Here's the map you can steer around in on your own! Remember, click play in the lower left hand corner, then move the time slider all the way to the left. You'll be able to see all the QSO paths and their F2 skip paths (based on Boulder, CO ionosonde data at the time of the QSO.) If you click play again, you'll be able to see how the QSOs played out over time.
Notes
Difference in Altitude
I'm still working through getting the F2 traces to routinely emit from the ground. This time, Google Maps said the elevation here was 2982.468 m, but Cesium is happier with 2947.468 m, co about 35 meters lower than expected. Even then, we're not on the ground
SQL Query
select
tx_lng,
tx_lat,
rx_lng,
rx_lat,
rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp,
rm_rnb_history_pres.dB,
rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter,
haversine(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng) as total_path,
gis_partial_path_lat(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lat,
gis_partial_path_lng(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lng,
id,
strftime('%Y%m%d', timestamp) as date,
strftime('%H%M', timestamp) as time,
'US-4399' as park,
'KD0FNR' as call,
'BC840' as ionosonde,
2947.468 as elev_tx
from
rm_rnb_history_pres
where
dB > 100
and timestamp > '2024-05-29'
and timestamp < '2024-05-30'
order by
rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp desc
SQL Query for RBN and QSOs
Due to a bug/oversight in the system, I have to run with tx location coordinates set in the query when I want to include RBN spots, so here's that query
select
-107.7179358 as tx_lng,
37.8227611 as tx_lat,
rx_lng,
rx_lat,
rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp,
rm_rnb_history_pres.dB,
rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter,
haversine(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng) as total_path,
gis_partial_path_lat(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lat,
gis_partial_path_lng(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lng,
id,
strftime('%Y%m%d', timestamp) as date,
strftime('%H%M', timestamp) as time,
'US-4408' as park,
'KD0FNR' as call,
'BC840' as ionosonde,
2947.468 as elev_tx
from
rm_rnb_history_pres
where
timestamp > '2024-05-29'
and timestamp < '2024-05-30'
order by
rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp desc
References
Ionosonde Data
This was made possible with data collected by
Reinisch, B. W., and I. A. Galkin, Global ionospheric radio observatory (GIRO), Earth, Planets, and Space, 63, 377-381, doi:10.5047/eps.2011.03.001, 2011.
We got to camp a bit more in the middle of nowhere than we usually do while traveling across Utah last weekend. My partner found the Burr Trail Scenic Byway. I've looked for a route across southern Utah for the last several years, but had somehow missed this really nice, well-paved, little road.
We camped at the foot of an East-facing cliff, and the QSO map for the POTA reflected that fact pretty nicely:
Based on this overall map, I didn't think we could hit the West Coast because of this cliff face.
Almost all of the QSOs and spots paid attention to that cliff face. And then, there was N0OI:
How? How had the signal cleared the cliff and skipped out to Perris, CA?
Using data from the Boulder, CO ionosonde, at the time Project TouCans was spotted in California, the F2 layer skip is modeled in the gif below. Note that it clears the mesa, (just barely.)
The other skip off to the Southeast was headed to the Cayman Islands. All of the skewing around is to convince myself that the the F2 path lines up with the path to the spotting station. You'll notice that there's a slight elevation offset that needs to be fixed.
More Notes on the POTA
I blew out my knee a bit sitting on the ground outside the tent for a three hour podcast interview on Friday night, consequently, the gang did most of the station set up including deploying Project TouCans in its dipole. Throughout that process, the family pup kept me company
When the gang were done, we had what, for Project TouCans, was a fairly typical antenna height of about five feet over the ground
One really interesting aspect of this POTA was that I didn't have the ability to Internet spot myself. Frankly, I wasn't sure it was going to work out at all, and for the longest time from about 00:02 GMT 24-05-27 till 13:50 GMT on the same day, it didn't. (Yes, I was asleep for most of that time with the rig turned off.) And then! Thanks—I think—to a few neighboring POTA stations, ops started to realize that TouCans was there! It may have also helped that my first QSO with WI5D was a bit of a rag chew.
Also, while hanging out on the cliff, the gang found an interesting mineral/quartz/mica/I don't know sample of rock. It was flat, broke easily, and contained pockets of crystals that were translucent. Any ideas what this might be?
For the moment, I'll leave you with this map of all the spots and QSOs for the POTA over the course of the evening, and into the next morning. Click play, then move the time slider all the way back to the left to see all the spots and QSOs with their associated F2 skips at once. Then, you can hit play to see how it all unfolded. (Keep in mind, the overnight nothingness is included in the map. You may want to skip over that.)
As a final note, while I'm waiting for all the F2 data to come back, I've been trying to convince the gang that the F2-height datastream from the Boulder, CO ionosonde
is in fact entered manually by a room of accountants not unlike those in John Wick, but to no avail. I guess they're just digital natives :)
Ah! And credits to where the ionosonde data actually is coming from
This was made possible with data collected by
Reinisch, B. W., and I. A. Galkin, Global ionospheric radio observatory (GIRO), Earth, Planets, and Space, 63, 377-381, doi:10.5047/eps.2011.03.001, 2011.
So, it seems like the correct altitude in this case should be 0. (Start the line on the ground.) But, if I put in zero for altitude, I get the result shown above
Found a reference to quaternions. Ahhhh, quaternions.
References
Ionosonde Data
This was made possible with data collected by
Reinisch, B. W., and I. A. Galkin, Global ionospheric radio observatory (GIRO), Earth, Planets, and Space, 63, 377-381, doi:10.5047/eps.2011.03.001, 2011.
The recent pair of QSOs to Japan from Project TouCans from Great Basin National Park has me wondering about F2 layer ionospheric skip propagation again.
I got our F2 skips working for CZML. Here's a look at the skip path for JJ2JQF de KO6BTY. Notice the Earedson ionosonde is almost right in the middle
to pull in ionosonde data. To access different stations, you need different ursiCode values, (one per station.) These can be found at https://www.digisonde.com/ under the URSI column.
This URL worked great in the browser, but thanks to this issue, stumbled a few times in the czml plugin's calls to get_f2m.
References
Ionosonde Data
This was made possible with data collected by
Reinisch, B. W., and I. A. Galkin, Global ionospheric radio observatory (GIRO), Earth, Planets, and Space, 63, 377-381, doi:10.5047/eps.2011.03.001, 2011.
Today KO6BTY made a QSO to Japan from Great Basin National Park!!!
Not only that, but she also made her first POTA activation! She was operating from Project TouCans as KD0FNR/KO6BTY on 20 meters. Here's the QSO map, (after hitting play in the lower left corner, all the QSOs will shown for a brief moment; if you click pause you can zoom in/out and view all of them at once; continuing with 'play' will remove all QSOs and display each QSO as it happened in time during the activation):
This morning at the 2nd POTA activation here, I got to talk (OK, CW), with JG0AWE again!
Just like last year!
I was using a bit more power this year. Project TouCans is running somewhere between 3 and 5 Watts at the moment.
He caught me just before the gang go the oatmeal ready, (we're camping on the edge of Great Basin National Park), On top of that, a RBN station in Japan had spotted Project TouCans about half an hour before. There wasn't a grey line between our locations, so I'm curious about what was going on, but delighted to have made the QSO!
Here's the activation in Cesium so you can see where the sun was in relation to the QSO. The QSO takes place at 14:49 near the end of the animation.
Tuesday morning, with Project TouCans working better that it had in days, I noticed that the ends of our stranded wire antenna had begun to fray out. I grabbed a roll of washi tape from my pocket, (who doesn't take washi tape on a radio outing?), and a few minutes later, voila
The end of our antenna was no longer frayed, and nosie was down significantly! Here's a view of our activation site from the opposite angle looking out over the Great Basin of Great Basin National Park US-0032.
I made two QSOs last night from the home QTH with a lot of noise! They were to KA6JLT in Reno, NV and and WN1Z in Susanville, CA from here in San Francisco.
This time, we did not measure the power out of Project TouCans. I suspect our several decades old Radio Shack power meter has given up the ghost, or there's something wonky in one of the cheapo connectors from Amazon.
As a side note, the radio is much quieter and works better when the RF output leads are soldered directly to the banana binding posts at the top of the rig that the antenna attaches to.
Side, side note. KO6BTY and I need to keep a slightly cleaner workbench. The rig sparked and vaporized a stray shred of wire yesterday once when we powered it up.
Project TouCans WorkbenchProject TouCans Flies Again
Reading up on the Tuna Topper and funding for amateur radio projects
Since we're now blowing FETs on Project TouCans, and KO6BTY and I are giving a presentation about the rig to the San Francisco Amateur Radio Club on Friday, I've been reading up on amplifier theory. I really like this article explaining how the different classes of amplifiers work except for the horribly gendered first paragraph.
In other reading news, (it's finals week for KO6BTY and I'm getting ready for our camping trip, so mostly all I've had time to do over the last few days is read), Simon Willison pointed out that the Amateur Radio Digital Communications group has grants for advancing the usage and technology of amateur radio. Here are some examples of what's been funded.
And finally, here's a link to the article that taught me how to increase power output on the Tuna Topper by upping the bias voltage. It's an even more cool article now that I know how the calls A Tuna Topper amplifier actually works.
To wrap things up, we're hoping to get TouCans back up and running today. Here's a nighttime look at the rig from the ground. The white object is the 10 meter rig's balun.
Up until about a week and a half ago, Project TouCans and the Flying Rockmite before it had never blown a final amplifier transistor. Our good fortune with transistors was caused in large part not by any particular genius in the construction or handling of the radio, but almost entirely to radio frequency interference. When too much RF energy was reflected back into the radio on key down, the Rockmite's picokeyer would reset chirping out an only slightly irritated 73 in Morse code. Hence, we couldn't use the rig, hence we changed the antenna or repaired the rig, or turned down the bias voltage on the Tuna Topper final until we could use the rig without resetting that little keyer.
Then! Then we did something that was both cool and, (we'd later find out), somewhat daunting. We removed the last of the wires that attached Project TouCans to the Earth and our RFI just went away. Which has been great for signal quality, and as it tuns out it's occasionally been hell on the amplifier.
At present count, we're three transistors down.
After the rig dropped from about 15 feet up to the ground recently, I did a quick inspection and then, (why!!!!??? why did I do that???), decided I'd measure the rig's output power since I hadn't done that in a while. The power meter reported 3 Watts. The rig nominally outputs 5 Watts. I adjusted the bias voltage on the Tuna Topper and.. still 3 Watts. I increased the voltage two more times, and? The final transistor blew out. (Eventually taking the rechargeable battery with it.) KO6BTY and I completed our debug yesterday, reattached the power meter, (which apparently no longer works since it reported 0 Watts at all bias voltages), and fairly quickly blew out the amp transistor again as I blithely upped the bias voltage.
Turns out I can't do that anymore. our keyer RFI safeguard is gone.
Interestingly, we did discover that when the bias is set to low on the amp, there's a whistling feedback tone that appears in the audio output. When the amp is biased correctly, and before it's biased too high and takes out the transistor, (i.e. in nominal operating mode), the whistling tone goes away. Audio debug lives on to a certain extent.
We'll be dropping in transistor number four tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.
KO6BTY and I attended office hours with Simon Willison yesterday.
At the very end of our call, Simon showed us how we could open a czml directly from our localhost Datasette server in Cesium. After about an hour this morning, the video below shows the results.
Here's what you're seeing. There's an SQL query in our Datasette instance that grabs only the QSOs from our Cibola National Forest POTA back in March. That query resulted in 9 QSOs shown in the table. Our additional CZML (and now Cesium viewer) plugin creates a CZML map that is loaded into a Cesium Ion viewer at the bottom of the page.
I'm not releasing the code that loads up the viewer quite yet because I have to get the access token squirreled away and all that good stuff. Meanwhile the CZML plugin has been released for a few days now.
By the way, we need a way to pull adif files from POTA activations into Datasette. Keep an eye out :)
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