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.

 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:

Notice the cutoff  with no QSOs past Utah and Arizona. That's what I saw during the same day for TouCans on the RBN:

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?

 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.

 Halibut Electronics is working on a new satellite antenna kit!

This is kinda cool for two reasons, first because we've recently started attending the high altitude balloon meetups at Noisebridge. Satellite antennas came up during one of the meetings.

More tactically importanly though, the EggNogs docs inspired what be a better tuna can feedtrough for Projct TouCan's antenna! For notes, here's my original EggNogs documentation review reply:

The documentation looks great so far! I've made it to page 17/22. One thing:
 
 
For those of us with partners heavily into fountain pens, those of us who like to print out manuals on JIS B5 paper and then store them in Kokuyo Campus binders, page numbers in the table of contents would be very cool. (I know, I know, such a niche group :) )
 
Mostly though, I wanted to thank you for jogging my memory into a, (I hope), better solution for Project TouCans antenna ports. At present, they're inverted bananna plug posts. Banana plug screw terminals are tiny, and therefore somewhat problematic in outdoor environments. Here's an idea of how tiny
 

 

 
Suspending a two pound rig 6 meters up, eventually the screw threads begin to strip. We stuck with banana plugs though because the insulator around the conductor makes them perfect for mounting in a tuna fish can. Yes, I've read about how Yagis and dipoles are balanced and therefore have 0 volts across the antenna center, so theoretically you don't need insulators, but TouCans frequently hangs at angles to the ground and/or very close to the ground,  so, insulators.
 

 
Anyhow! The last figure on page 17, the one with the cool weather-proof washer, reminded me that gromets exist! With the correct sized gromet, we can put any size bolt pointing upward as an antenna connector.
 

 
And, even better still, we can source them from our local hardware store at the bottom of the hill!
 
Thanks Mark!
72 de KD0FNR Hamilton

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.

 I finally landed at a quiet tape vs. noise  configuration for TouCans on Saturday afternoon. Here’s how.

In other parts of the project, the Pico-W has started burning through pairs of AA batteries rather quickly.

 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:

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.

KO6BTY and Tawnse diagrammed TouCans on the nearby beach the first evening. Later that night, the rig reached KF9VV in Wisconsin.

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:

Anyway, a few minutes later, we’d gone from this

To this

Which, in turn, led to this later that evening.

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 in an office hour we attended with him—but haven't put up a demo video! Here's a video of a few of KO6BTY's QSOs from one of our recent camping trips along with their associated F2 ionospheric skips.

 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.

 On one of the most interesting radio days of our recent camping trip, Project TouCans made QSOs with Australia, Japan, Columbia, and Argentina, all on the same day! The QSOs to Japan and Australia were made in the middle of their night. The Japan, Australia, and Columbia QSOs were all made in a sixteen minute window beginning with VK3YV at 12:40 UTC.

What was the Propagation Mode?

Chordal Modes Introduced with Villard

Carter Manny Jr. worked with Stanislaw. Here's his Chicago Tribune obituary.

Finding Our Antipodal Point

To find the anitpoidal point, we can follow our longitude over the North (or South for that matter) where it will become the same longitude minus 180 degrees, or pi radians if that's the unit you prefer. You can see this in the diagram below where our longitude of about -107 degrees traced over the pole becomes about 73 degrees.

Meanwhile, our latitude above the equator will be used to find the same number of degrees below the equator:

37.82275 becomes -37.82275.

More precisely, we get 

37.822754°N 107.717935°W -> 37.822754°N 72.282065°E

And our anitpodal is shown below near the 70 degrees East label.

Pretty excellent discussion of anitpodal points.

Conclusions for the moment

 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

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. 

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.

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

 POTA activation from Silverton in twenty-one minutes!

Project TouCans had one of its highest ever antenna placements.

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

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.

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