Daily Archives: 12/7/2008

K1EL remounted in a better box…

This morning, I decided to take the new box that I had acquired and remount my K1EL keyer into it. The new box is somewhat larger, so it actually has space for all five of the possible dedicated buttons that the K1EL supports, instead of the mere three that I had haphazardly bored into the previous incarnation. I was a bit more careful to make sure that there was sufficient internal clearance. As it was, I still had a single minor issue: the input jack can actually make glancing contact with the button cell. A quick fix was found however, I simply stick a piece of post-it note to the jack, and that was enough to break the contact.

I didn’t have time to wire up all the additional switches, but they are at least all mounted, and maybe next week I’ll get them all wired in. I’m quite pleased with the overall result this time: I don’t think I’ll need a third try. 🙂

Addendum: I realized yesterday that I didn’t have a complete drill set anymore. I was in the neighborhood of Harbor Freight, and picked up one of their cheap 29 piece sets. I was going to drill a 1/4″ hole, so fetched out the 1/4″ from my new set, chucked it in the drill press, and…

It was bent.

I have gotten smaller diameter drill bits that were bent before, but not 1/4″. Annoying.

Low NOAA 17 Pass

I woke up this morning, and wanted to relax a bit before the day’s exciting activities (more on this later), so I noted that NOAA17 was coming up. I got out after the pass (which had a maximum elevation of under 15 degrees) was under way, but the audio sounded pretty clear, so I recorded the audio and got the following picture:

Because it was so short, I wasn’t 100% sure what I was staring at. The water at the lower right was (I suspected) the Gulf of Mexico, but I wasn’t 100% sure. So I got out my mapping software and plotted the path of NOAA17 along the ground. Sure enough, that seems plausible.

I should figure out how to plot the visible region for NOAA passes, so I can do this more routinely. In fact, I could probably merge this with my satellite prediction code to give the ground tracks of satellites more routinely. More stuff for the future!