Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

40m came alive in the last hour, as we started to get close to evening, and as 20m was frankly played out.

I was going to plug my rig into battery, but then saw in the rules that your computer has to be on battery power as well, and I didn't have a way to plug my shack computer into battery, so I didn't bother running the rig off battery.

Then when I went to submit my log, I saw that actually your logging computer can be mains powered, so the rules must have been about the computer you are using for digital modes. Which I wasn't. I did all CW, no multi-mode multipliers for me!

So I could have gotten another multiplier for my 2-point CW QSOs for my solar-charged battery, as well as the 4x QRP multiplier. I could have had 510 points instead of 408 points. Which doesn't matter at all because I'm not actually in any form of contention for anything; I worked only about five hours thanks to all the winter storm prep. And even if I'd worked the whole time I still wouldn't be competitive. I only hunted, I didn't run.

And running only 5W, I didn't even make the antenna wire warm enough to melt the ice that was covering it.

Maybe next year I'll run instead of hunting. But probably still QRP, and maybe actually in the field...

#WinterFieldDay #HamRadio

Yay, I worked @kb6nu

Even though I'm doing this from home, I decided to operate QRP, so I have the rig turned down to a measly 5W. Operating QRP is an exercise in patience to get through, but I'm now to the point that most of the calls I copy get a big red DUPE in not1mm. I got two on 40m, which was two more than I was expecting. I won't have a map handy until I load from not1mm into wavelog, but so far south Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, Quebec, and Ontario bound the stations I've worked so far.

Almost everything has been on 20m but a few 40m QSOs.

One more hour.

Working WFD CW today. Didn't yesterday due to doing storm preparations. Not a serious contester here, just pulled up not1mm, and am using it to send code so that I don't slow down more serious folks with my bad keying, just using the key when I need to send something that I didn't have a macro for, or to send slowly. Just now, I was delighted that I copied a 2x3 call on first hearing at 35WPM and then was deflated to hear "TEST" afterwards. I didn't know what contests are currently active, but I'm trying to do WFD not a contest.

#HamRadio #WinterFieldDay

Today I released version 0.7 of my print-in place single-paddle Morse code key.

This will function as release notes:

• The most important practical change is that the slot in the lever for the stabilizer bar is taller, so that it doesn't bind. Previously, it sometimes bound depending on luck, and when it didn't bind, needed to be greased with a light lubricant.
• The most important user-facing change is updated build instructions, now with pictures. Previously, the instructions were just text.
• The most important developer-facing change is that it was rebuilt with FreeCAD 1.1RC, and all recalculation errors and warnings were removed. previously, it had quit building correctly due to changes in FreeCAD.
• The side contacts are better aligned with the common/ground screw in the lever when using thin ring terminals. (It was previously optimized for thick terminals.)
• The rear stabilizing bar was never necessary and was just extra weight and ugly complexity, so it has been removed.
• The spring radius is no longer an explicit parameter.
• I added more links to sources for hardware.

This is getting close to what I would consider a polished, 1.0 release.

As always, I crave feedback. If you build this, I want to hear what went well and what, if anything did not.

#MorseCode #HamRadio

Here's the story. It's amazing! Two pilots in a Discus Duo. Starting at 3AM local time and flying with night-vision goggles!

https://www.weglide.org/flight/978820

Airplane with incapacitated pilot lands safely thanks to emergency autoland system:

https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reported-safe/?utm_source=newsletter-88&utm_medium=mastodon

I haven't listened to the attached LiveATC recording, but there is one if you are curious how an air traffic controller would mix emergency automated traffic with normal human-piloted traffic.

Looks like he made it all the way there. 12h 8m flight.

This is an amazing soaring flight!

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N189DT/history/20251219/1200Z/KMEV/KGCK

#aviation #soaring

Have a small plane and want to get approval for a reasonable change that requires approval? It looks like the FAA doesn't want to be bothered with your innovation any more — only large companies need apply now. #aviation

The end of an era.

About 15 years ago, I got a used 42U rack, and with great effort got it into my basement, where it held various computers and UPS units over the years. A couple years ago, though, I moved to a smaller computer as the "home server" and emptied out the rack. The rack then sat empty in my house, a bulky relic.

This evening, an acquaintance came and picked it up, so it's off to live a new useful life again.

And now a path through the basement is newly re-opened. 🎉

The prototype worked well enough that I'll proceed on to another iteration. Leaning it out with two legs held up by the radial wire worked well, and the little knobs on the top of the spool to hold the wire in place work fine. I'll made them a touch larger to be more robust, but the concept works.

I want to be able to fit 12m of wire on the spool, because I want radials that work well as flat radials on 40m, which might take up to 28%λ instead of the nominal ¼λ which would be appropriate in the "discone" setup with 45° radials. However, with this wire, 8m barely fits on this spool. So I need to add a generous allowance for more wire.

I need a handle for the hub at the bottom so that I can wind it up with the legs removed. It's unwieldy with two 6' long fiberglass stakes.

According to DJØIP, 1 elevated, tuned radial is roughly equivalent to 8 ground radials. Two of these should give me the performance of 16 ground radials. According to his table, I can expect 3.76dB gain over my usual 4 radials on the ground, or even more if I'm using a shortened antenna.

With these just leaning, if someone inadvertently walks into my bright pink wire, they'll probably just knock over the leaning posts, which is unlikely to cause a big problem. I'll probably use bullet connectors for the other end of the wire so that they can pop out and not knock the antenna over.

@qrper mentioned in his recent video how some hams like to make antennas.

Guilty as charged.

It was only last night that I finished my new linked dipole. But sometimes I want to operate with a vertical. Putting radials on the ground has worked pretty well on North Carolina Piedmont clay, but on dry sand near the beach, they acted like tuned radials, and the antenna performance was terrible, except on the 20m band they were cut for, because the dry sand wasn't conductive.

Now I want to be able to set up an elevated vertical with elevated radials, field-tunable for multiple bands.

My thought is to tune the vertical for SWR with the antenna on the ground, then move it up to an elevated base (I have a tripod for this) and elevate radials.

My current idea is a spool with knobs on top. Wrap wire around the spool and pay it out to the right length for the band, then loop it around one of the knobs to hold it in place. Two driveway markers underneath act as legs.

How are two legs stable? Tensegrity!

Make the whole contraption lean away from the antenna, and hang a little weight from underneath, with the radials in tension.

Five 3d-printed parts, fourteen screws, and two driveway markers per elevated radial. Heat-shrink printed labels marking the right spot on the wire for each band, or maybe even the top and bottom of large bands so that I can tune. Maybe other labels for if I move the vertical element up a lot higher and deploy radials down like a discone, in which case the radial lengths will have to be different. I could imagine just two of these for normal mostly horizontal deployment, but three or four for a portable discone.

I expect that would make for an efficient vertical antenna setup that will work over any ground and not require any stakes or other ground fixtures, just maybe a few weights on the tripod if it's windy, and some light weights (dual-purpose my arborist throw bags? borrow local rocks?) pulling out the radials.

#HamRadio #AmateurRadio

Today's #HamRadio #POTA (Parks On The Air) adventure. Absolutely gorgeous, couldn't-be-better fall weather on a Saturday, so that it was a little surprising that we found parking space and that all the picnic tables were empty. Used my spiderbeam push-up mast to hold my inverted-v linked dipole up, tied the ends out to some trees, and got on the air on 20 meters, using CW (morse code) as usual. I first hunted operators in other parks and got 4 QSOs, but the pileups were deep, so I found a quiet frequency and called CQ. I didn't have to wait for responses, either! Some pileups were so deep they sounded like modem noise (showing my age here). A little intimidating for the new CW operator, but the other operators were patient with me.

AZ is one of the states I haven't gotten in my hunter logs yet, so I was happy to see AZ pop up for one call sign. However, that operator reported IL, so I still don't have AZ. I'll have to keep hunting!

By the end, I was getting a lot of QRM (interference from human sources). That's the curse of operating QRP (low power) — I'm sure they couldn't hear my measly 5W and weren't intentionally operating on top of me. That was OK, though; I had 31 QSOs and I was ready to QRT (quit) for the day.

We had a surprise opportunity to go to the beach this weekend, near Southport NC. I have the weird preference to sling my hammock under the house, between the clotheslines, instead of sleeping indoors. Half camping? I use a big rubbermaid box as my "suitcase" and put my shoes on it overnight... It was cold at night, but an underquilt and reflecting bubble insulation in the hammock, with an inflatable mattress on top of my down sleeping bag, kept me cozy.

My wife and I went to Fort Fisher State Recreation Area and set up a pair of #HamRadio transceivers. Because this weekend was SSB CQ World Wide DX contest, she couldn't find an empty space to call CQ, and had trouble breaking through pileups, so after a few QSOs she decided it wasn't fun any more and read a book. It was not the CW CQ DX contest weekend, so I successfully activated US-3842 with Morse code. Then back at the beach house, I kept ducking out onto the porch to hunt #POTA operators using CW, with a 33' random wire antenna hanging from a spiderbeam pole, connected to the 9:1 port on my tiny little homebrew QRP dual-port unun. One of those QSOs was with the ham who sold me my KX3 that I used to make the contact! 🎉

I gave the random wire a workout with QSOs on 40, 30, 20, 17, and 15 meters. Tried hunting with no luck on 80, 12, and 10 meters.

The wind eventually broke the antenna wire off the terminal, so I'll want to fix that before going out again. But at the beach, it was easy to bodge that by stripping back a bit of insulation and screwing the bare wires in the terminal.

I bought an inexpensive mini-PC that came with Ubuntu pre-installed. That's fine, but I have no interest in running that; I want to run Fedora. Preferably Silverblue. But every attempt I've made to install Silverblue ends up with the error the commmand 'ostree admin --sysroot=/mnt/sysimage deploy --os=fedora fedora:fedora/42/x86_64/silverblue' exited with the code 1 which leads to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1575957 which indicates that I can fix the problem by reformatting the EFI partition during install, but no such luck.

Fedora Workstation 42 installed just fine, so I'm using that instead.

@trevorflowers You know you are a hobby machinist when it's easier to make a new screwdriver than find the one you misplaced. 😀

Years ago, I saw someone say "My love language is removing tracking links from URLs that I share" and it has lived in my brain rent-free ever since.

Today I realized that if a site I like and want to promote isn't yet on the fediverse, changing utm_medium from (say) email to mastodon might show them a weird result in their google analytics (or whatever) dashboard.

I know, I know, Mastodon is not the fediverse. But it has enough mindshare that it's the easiest path into the fediverse for someone investigating an unexpected value for utm_medium in their dashboard. And maybe we can bring in more respected and valued folks by showing them grassroots interest. 🤞

In order to 3d print a little amplified speaker box to use for #HamRadio SSB 2-operator POTA with my wife, I want to model components and then model the box to go around them. I found a speaker on grabcad that is only a few mm different from the speaker I found in my bin. Just different enough that I need to start over to create a good basis for my box model. I didn't bother constraining everything perfectly when modeling the steps in the metal shell, and I didn't model the cone accurately because those really don't matter that much. It's good enough to check for interference.

I have barrel and XT60 power connectors already modeled from my last project to choose from here, but I need to add models for the 3.5" phono jacks and the TDA2050 amplifier board I bought from Amazon. Trying to decide whether to use that completely as-is or desolder the potentiometer for the volume control and use wires to re-route it to a more convenient place. A model might help answer that question.

Not quite #FreeCADFriday unless you give me about 22 hours of grace. 😀

"Microsoft ♥️ Linux" so much they are going way out of their way to get people to ditch Windows for Linux. It's not just the TPM requirement. Here's someone already on Windows 11 discovering just how hostile Windows can be towards users.

https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/

Why do I in North Carolina need to be interrupted as if a tornado were coming when someone fights with a cop in Georgia? What exactly is AGGRIVATED ASSAULT anyway? (Did someone throw a sandwich at a LEO again? 🙄)

I'd rather leave alerts on, but this kind of abuse of the emergency alert system makes the system useless.