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