Nine year-old Tawnse and I got half-way to activating the park before the ML-300 Bluetooth transmitter gave up the ghost. I knew I forgot to charge something. 

Tawnse was so entranced with the walled Philadelphia park she thought we should have stayed the extra half hour we would have probably needed to activate it. 

What led Tawnse to this scheduling priority decision? Turns out the park doubles  as the neighborhood dog park. There's only one way in or out though a small and, of course, historic  cemetery. By the time the pups got to the wander-around-unleashed bit we were in they were far to transfixed to try to leave. Turns out two of the pups were aspiring radio engineers to boot .We’ll get to that.

Because our antenna was low, propagation wasn't great on 20m at 15:30 UTC on the East Coast next to an interstate in Philadelphia. Even so right after I self-spotted a fellow ham immediately called in from South Dakota. After that, the QSOs came in every five minutes or so on average. We talked to Louisiana, two hams from Florida (whose QSOs came in back to back, and a ham from Tennessee. 

I'm curious if the QSOs from Florida might have come from the same physical station. I’ll find out when I map out the activation. In the meantime, I really, really need to think more about local-first data and how to download map tiles onto this device.  I remember that Simon Wllison has written about this more than once on his blog, so Im basically leaving a reminder to myself to go look that up. It would be nice to map things when I’m offline at least down to geographic regions like, lets say, cities?

The other folks who stopped by the park were very, very nice. Also, they had dogs. Tawnse and I met two daschunds, one of which was very fluffy, and two Golden Retrievers. All of whom introduced themselves at our picnic table.

Did I mention we had a low dipole placement? This would be the bit about our two radio-engineering dogs.

The Golden Retrievers immediately caught on to our dipole positioning being just to low, and they were certain they could fix it. They first sniffed out the rolls of tarred twine laying on the ground below each of the two trees that supported the dipole. They considered pulling on the twine. Perhaps I just hadn't really put my back into it. Then, they each decided it was probably a problem with the tree, and started to climb the tree following the twine. Until they remembered that they were dogs and heh, dogs don't climb trees. Abashed, one of them gave up. The other one though… That guy! He followed the antenna out of the tree till he saw TouCans which was only about six feet up, putting the dipole seven feet up. 

He. Could. Fix. This. He leapt at the radio to see if maybe he could adjust it. Fortunately, for all of us, his vertical leap was just a bit too short.

Tawnse just giggled and giggled and giggled. You gotta love engineering dogs.

Like I mentioned before, the Bluetooth transmitter's battery died right after the 5th QSO, and that was that. We were off to pick up KO6BTY from the library and get some of the best Italian food in the world from Paesanos on 9th St.

QSO map coming soon.

 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, I was happy to find that there were plenty of branches under the hedge tree row

Here is the map. For the moment, it has F2 skips. Please ignore them, I will get a map without them in place soon.

Other US-8422 References:

 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:

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.

• http://spase.info/SMWG/Observatory/GIRO

 Washi tape to the rescue again!

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

 It's kinda awesome to have data!

Earlier today I was working on the elevation profile project I've been writing about throughout the week. I've moved the project up to the point where an enrichment provides the elevation at the transmit location of the QSO, (my end of the path.) Looking at the results, at first I thought I must have introduced a bug at some point. The first two QSO elevations were meters and 3 meters high. That seemed awfully close to sea level, especially considering that most of my POTAs are made from the sides of various mountains. Looking at the table row for the 3 meter QSO I inspected the date: March 14th of 2024. I checked my photos to see where the gang and I were on that day and found this

So! We were at just about sea level, that being the sea just to the right-hand side of the picture.

What about the two meter high QSO? At this point it occurred to me that I didn't need to look back at pictures to see where we'd been on the 23rd of March of last year. Instead I could simply look at the QSO on the maps produced by the kml plugin for Datasette. When I did, I found this: