Up until yesterday, Project TouCans required two battery packs, one in the rig itself to power the Rockmite and Tuna Topper amplifier and a much smaller external one to power the Pico-W that controls the rig's keyer and straight key. I tried bringing a USB A cable directly from the Imuto power bank in the rig out to the Pico-W, but the RFI was too much for the Pico-W causing it to reboot, or just turn off. That led to the two or three AA battery battery pack, which frankly was a bit to much extra weight, and a bit unwieldy. Thant's all fixed now! I added as second Adafruit USB-C power adapter to the rig and that provided enough filtering that the Pico-W is happy as long as I make sure the rig doesn't transmit at all until the antenna is completely unfurled, which is a pretty reasonable expectation. When/if the rig does transmit with the antenna bundled up, the Pico-W reboots, then it presses the straight key which upsets the rig, causing the rig to reboot, except on re
I don't use the nascent straight key mode of the Project TouCans 20 meter ham radio as much as I could because the onboard Pico-W that serves as the control center and keyer of the rig, historically, has had unreliable Wi-Fi performance. (Alas, I partially blame the Windows laptop that sends the straight key signals as well.) Sadly, this can result in the key being stuck down which requires me to lower the radio and reset the keyer. While I've marveled at the fact that a laptop could be 20 feet from the Pico-W and have just adequate communications, and a signal level that showed as medium to weak. That's all, apparently, been fixed with a simple flip of the Pico-W. Literally. The Pico-W had power supply connection issues when mounted in a plug board directly on the rig like so: It's not too, too hard to see why. The battery leads are smallish, and were by no means a compression fit into the plugboard. I fussed fussed with this configuration, but to no avail. Also?