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?
While the QSOs were awesome! How did they happen? I did a bit of research.
Spoiler: I don't have an answer yet.
If you have ideas, I'd love help on this, please comment!
Dayside stations talking to nightside stations led me to sv1uy's page on chordal hop propagation which had a nice diagram
The rest of the notes from below followed from this diagram. I don't have answers yet, but here are my notes. I've been talking with the kids about radio occultation, refraction, and of course, the Gladych research project during all of this. I'm also using it to introduce trig which will layer in with the work the 11 and 9 year-olds, (Mota and Tawnse), are doing with fractions.
This mode, (numbered page 4 of Gold's thesis), is interesting because we had plenty of scattering. Notice the mountain peaks and ridges all round us below.
Chordal Modes Introduced with Villard
And we have our first reference to Villard, which included Okinawa, and therefore two different Gladychs, Michael's Project Smoke Puff article, and Stanislaw who was the architect for the Okinwa base in 1955.
And there's a bit of a Gladych aside here that's just too difficult to ignore. Apparently Stanislaw also few planes in World War II? I knew Michael did, but this is the first mention [pdf] I've seen of Stanislaw being a pilot
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:
I don't know what propagation mode we had yet. We're going to pull some ionosonde data next to see if there was in fact a 'tilt' in the ionosphere at the time of the QSOs.
A few weeks ago, the 13, 11, and 9 year-old gang and I were out on our yearly camping trip, hanging out near Great Basin National Park above Baker, NV, when KO6BTY and I got to participate in a Ham Radio Workbench episode! It was a lot of fun! (It was also one of the latest nights up we had during the trip.)
If you're landing here from there, we talked about a lot of things including:
We just made it back from our camping trip yesterday, so I hope to have a lot of updates over the next few days, and maybe some pretty pictures as well like this one of Mt. Wheeler and, of course, Project TouCans.
There's a scholarship available for CW ops! When I wrote the Sprat article on our keyer, I thought I was kidding, but I guess the keyer actually is for kids... er students... ummm not that students can't be older than kid age... Anyway. :)
The CWOps club offers a $1000 scholarship annually for students who operate CW on the ham bands. Here's what a student needs to do to prove they operate CW
"CW Ability: Demonstrated CW operating ability within the last 24 months by providing a copy of a certificate,listing in a magazine showing results or a letter from a person responsible for membership. Examples include but are not limited to the following :
i. ARRL Code Proficiency certificate at 15 wpm or higher;
ii. Successful completion of CWA Basic Level or higher;
iii. Membership in CWops or HSC or other club where some level of CW proficiency is a requirement for membership;
iv. Participation in a CW contest where the results have been published (participation in a multi-op where the station owner provides a letter saying you operated part or all the event operating CW);
v. Operation in a CW traffic net where the net manager provides a letter attesting to the candidate’s on-air participation; or
vi. Achieving any award where all contacts are CW."
There are So Many Scholarships!
You should also check out the ARRL site for all of the other scholarships that are available. It's a little early/late in the year, but I spotted this today, and I'll forget if I don't write this down now.
Project TouCans was featured in the qrper.com field kits column!!! I forgot to mention this when it came out a few months ago, but it's there!The noise issues for TouCans are much improved, and getting better. I'm still learning what should go where, but my learning curve seems to be accelerating a little bit at least. The most recent improvement—as of this afternoon—is that it helps to tape the transceiver to the back of the rain shield.
Wireless TouCans enabled me to do something I've never done before. I activate, not one, not two, but three parks in New Mexico last weekend! I activated US-4551 Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, US-4516 Lincoln National Forest, and finally, US-7877 Valley of Fires National Recreation Area. (Notice the new US designators in place of the Ks.) From the Organs, my first QSO was with Spain!
Given that I haven't published a 'week notes' in about a month, I should also add that I have a very rudimentary straight keyer working with TouCans Wireless. Development on the straiht keyer has been slow, but I did make a QSO using it.
And... I haven't written about it yet, but you'll notice the gang and I used OpenAI to build a banner for Project TouCans!
The gang and I finally got to go camping again. Mota and Tawnse, the 11 and 9 year-old have learned to start fires at their forest-esque school! This led to s'mores which, I hear were delicious!
During the trip, we also tested out TouCans Wireless. It worked well, reaching Alaska and the East Coast pretty handily.
I finally have a repeatable method to add timestamps to my Google Earth map animations. Of course, it's based on the Google Visualization API, so it's not necessarily permanent.
The Imuto battery pack it uses weighs in at about a pound, making it the heaviest component of the antenna-borne rig. I've always enjoyed using butcher twine to support the rig, but it looked—and felt—very much like butchers twine was not going to support Powered TouCans, (aka Wireless TouCans.) Butchers twine has always had a bit of an issue getting a bit jammed up on the sap of various trees. This has led to be being able to feel when the twine is about to break. With the extra weight of the battery pack, I've been having this feeling a lot more often. I needed a different way to suspend the radio, but didn't want to resort to rope if I could avoid it.
Enter tarred twine. I'd never heard of this stuff before it on Amazon, but wow! It's tensile strenght is higher, it can be about the same weight, and it doesn't hang up on tree limbs as much. The tar reduces the friction of the string overall. This led to no limb jams over the last weekend during all three POTAs across New Mexico! The tar makes the twine weigh a bit more per foot which gives it more of a rope feel in terms of sturdiness, but without the awkward width of a rope. The rig didn't fall once, nor did it once feel like the twine was going to break!
Here's evidence of the twine in action from the Lincoln National Forest POTA (I was on Monjeau Peak.)
One more twine trick before I go. I also learned over the last two weekends, that one can insert a rock into the end of the twine tube to add weight to roll of twine making it heft a bit farther when launched by an atlatl.
Shown here with lava rock that was returned to Valley of Fires, NM
This little trick also simplifies the design of the atlatl if you happen to be camping. It turns out that folding up a segmented tent pole with the exception of the final segment, creates a very handy two segment long atlatl! The picture below shows the length of two connected segments of th test pole. Want a longer throw? You can simply add more segments. The tent pole also has a bit more spring to it than a typical limb which adds yet a little more loft ot the twine spool. But why does the rock matter you ask? In addition to adding weight, it prevents the tent pole from emerging from the other side of the twine tube making for a more controlled lauch with less thought and less practice.
Sleeping pad as well as three year-old and five year-old's booted feet included for scale
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