Skip to main content

Posts

Things I Learned: Tarred Twine

Powered TouCans is heavy.  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 w
Recent posts

Spain on a 4 Foot Elevated Dipole on 20 meters with QRP: A Project TouCans Wireless Adventure

 Spain!!! My first QSO yesterday afternoon was with EA1EC in Spain. This is a new Project TouCans record—of sorts—for QSOs with a very-low-height 20 meter dipole! Do the Organ Mountains— K-4551— just have the knack for this? Maybe. In any event, TouCans does very, very well there. As usual, TouCans was running five Watts. Here's the QSO map from yesterday afternoon Also notice the QSO to Alaska! Here's the antenna placement: The antenna feed point is about four feet up! Just as strange, the antenna was supported—via a piece of tarred twine—by a metal picnic shelter on the other end, as shown in the video below One of the things TouCans has demonstrated really well is that amateur radio operators should 'just get an antenna in the air.' The rest usually takes care of itself.

Things I Learned: Time Stamps on QSO Maps using the Google Charts API, Datasette, and KML

 I'm still using that API that was deprecated. I know I should give it up, but it just keeps being useful. It's possibly the best Google product ever. (In that it just keeps on existing rather than falling into the deprecation void.) Specifically, I used the dynamic icon portion of the Google Charts API.  The Google Earth Pro animations of our QSO are missing something. (OK, maybe lots of things, but one thing I saw that I could add on this iteration.) They don't have a way to easily view the time of each QSO, or the progression of time during the POTA or SOTA session. Thanks to a suggestion  from a StackOverlow user , dynamic bubble icons have provided that! I've added icons that appear with each QSO on the map, displaying the callsign, received RST, and and time of the QSO, as well as a different set of time icons that simply update each minute of map time to display the UTC time as the map animates. Using the Google Dynamic Icon API The following address gives b

First Wireless Toucans POTA K-1178

Project TouCans made its first POTA flight this weekend! The rig made 51 QSOs! Alas, there were issues we get to fix.. Which is actually kind cool :) What the rig did well OK, the rig made it coast to coast, up to Alaska, and into Canada! Pretty impressive if I do say so myself. You might n otice that the bottom of the irg is about eight feet off the ground.That might make it seem like our radiation angle for 20 meters would be pretty high based on this Taken from  Radio Antenna Engineering The antenna is about 0.12 wavelengths off the ground, so the angle—and I'm being kind giving it that extra .012, but the twine was stretchy making that within the margtin of errorr for this back of the envelope estimation—should be about 60 degrees as marked by the red arrow. But, that's if the ground is flat. We were on the edge of a ridge. I know this because I kept having to chase the roll of butcher's twine down the hill. I used the SOTA map for nearby Mt. Tamalpais  (CC-063) summit

The straight key is up and Ummm... Limping!!!

  Wireless TouCans made its first straight key QSO with N2TNN last night! There are definitely kinks to work out in the straight keyer—most of them having to do with the keyer locking on—but I was able to hobble along at about twelve words per minute to complete the QSO! As you can see, the QSO was just about coast to coast, from San Francisco to  Gloucester, VA on five watts! For now, the straight keyer constructs a stream of keyboard key up and key down times in milliseconds. When the op hits the 'esc' key, that list is sent to the Pico-W that lives on the rig. The Pico-W then holds down the key for the first number of milliseconds in the list, releases the key for the second number and so on. Essentially, it records the op's fist, and then plays it back just a little bit later. Next steps include auto-buffering up key presses and shipping them off so that the op isn't bothered with that part of the process. Another nice feature might be a relay that shuts off the aud

Things I Learned: Embedding YouTube Shorts

 For me at least, there's no embed button on the share tab for YouTube shorts. I figured out how to get the videos in anyway. Step 1: Start with an embed iframe from any of your videos that aren't shorts. For example: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/idZ80-7WR4w?si=CFqyqDeqzq24OLVh" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> Then, grab the web link to your short from the sharing tab that you can access For example: https://youtube.com/shorts/5D1Bue0KSss?si=3MnCtoyuuxqOJbdh Copy the portion of the link that follows 'shorts/'. In the above example, you'd copy: 5D1Bue0KSss?si=3MnCtoyuuxqOJbdh Paste it into your usual iframe over the portion o the link that follows 'embed/' like so: <iframe width="560" height=&

Project TouCans Week Notes

Project TouCans has a logo!!!! A banner!!!??? A mascot!!!???!!! I don't know! But, it's cool!!! The gang and I played aroudn with Dall-E this afternoon via ChatGPT4. We started by asking for something that looked like a cross between github's octocat and a TouCan. Then, we started describing the radio, and we wound up with the above. And I like it! It's been a busy week. I was out of town, so I didn't get to get on the air as much as I would have liked. The radio is working great though!  Most of the innovation this week came in the form of the Pico-W keyer software. We can now change the keying speed with special commands sent in in the form of 'F' for a 0.005 second faster dah, or 'S' sent in for a 0.005 second longer dit. All other timings at the moment are based on the dit. Work continues on the straight key via WiFi project. The biggest technical issue at this point is figuring out how to create a Python sidetone that is cross-platform capable.