News Articles

By Jonathan Rizzo, KC3EEY

SAQ (callsign SAQ) is a VLF transmitting station located in Grimeton, Sweden and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site operated by the Alexanderson Association. The heart of the transmitter is the Alexanderson Alternator and six antenna towers that are iconic to the site. Twice a year, there is a CW transmission at 17.2 kHz with an inspirational message to listeners all over the world. On Alexanderson Day, July 2nd, 2023, SAQ is scheduled to be on the air. More details can be found here (https://alexander.n.se/en/alexanderson-day-2023/) and contains a tentative schedule and a YouTube live broadcast for those who would like to watch the event live.

Dr. Kristina Collins, KD8OXT, is the lead author on a new paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Earth System Science Data entitled Crowdsourced Doppler measurements of time standard stations demonstrating ionospheric variability. The Grape Personal Space Weather Station is a low-cost, high frequency (HF) receiver designed to make precision measurements of signals received from frequency standards stations such as WWV, WWVH, and CHU. Because these standards stations transmit carriers with atomic-clock grade frequency stability, and the Grape receiver achieves similar frequency stability through the use of a GNSS Disciplined Oscillator, variations in the received signal can be attributed to changes in the ionosphere. The new paper demonstrates this in multiple ways, including showing changes in Doppler frequency due to the dawn and dusk terminators, seasonal variations, wave signatures with Medium Scale Traveling Ionospheric Disturbance periods, and the ionospheric response to solar flares. The paper also explains how to access Grape data and the open-source software used to conduct the analysis. The co-author team consists of professionals, students, and HamSCI volunteers, including Kristina Collins KD8OXT, John Gibbons N8OBJ, Nathaniel Frissell W2NAF, Aidan Montare KB3UMD, David Kazdan AD8Y, Darren Kalmbach KC0ZIE, David Swartz W0DAS, Robert Benedict KD8CGH, Veronica Romanek KD2UHN, Rachel Boedicker AC8XY, William Liles NQ6Z, William Engelke AB4EJ, David G. McGaw N1HAC, James Farmer K4BSE, Gary Mikitin AF8A, Joseph Hobart W7LUX, George Kavanagh KB1HFT, and Shibaji Chakraborty KN4BMT. The Grape receivers are the focus of an NSF-funded experiment to study the upcoming 2023 annular and 2024 total solar eclipses. More information on building your own Grape receiver is available at hamsci.org/grape.

A key component of the HamSCI mission is to encourage amateurs to conduct and share their own research and experiments. Larry Serra N6NC recently published two articles in QEX Magazine from his trans-North Pacific 40m propagation projects: The first, "Why Summer 40m Propagation Is So Good Between Japan and the US Pacific Coast" (QEX SEPT/OCT 2022 p.14), examined 12 years of July JA-US 40m propagation conditions and CW Skimmer results on days of JA domestic CW contests and proposed that the relatively calm water under the almost wall-to-wall summertime North Pacific HIGH pressure centers provided nearly +12dBm enhanced low-angle signal strength due to a reduction of surface reflection absorptions in the 3-ionospheric refraction, 2-sea surface reflection propagation path.

HamSCI will play a major role at the 2023 Dayton Hamvention, to be be held in Xenia, Ohio May 19-21, 2023, at the Greene County Fairgrounds.  It is the world's largest ham radio gathering, having over 30,000 attendees in 2022. The Hamvention is an extremely important event for engaging with the amateur radio community, sharing ideas, developing collaborations, and sharing scientific results. The Hamvention 2023 theme is Innovation!, an excellent fit for HamSCI's goals.  HamSCI will be hosting Booth 5008 in the Hertz Building, giving presentations in the ARISS/YOTA area, and hosting the HamSCI Forum.  Support for the 2023 HamSCI Hamvention activities comes from The University of Scranton, the Yasme FoundationTAPR, the National Science FoundationNASA, and volunteers like you. 

 

Join the WWV Amateur Radio Club, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery (FCMoD), and the HamSCI for two excellent lectures to be live streamed on March 2, 2023 at 5:00PM Mountain Std Time (0000 UTC):

  • The History of WWV Frequency Broadcasts - Glenn Nelson, WWV Staff, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
  • WWV as a Beacon for Citizen Science - Dr. David Kazdan and Rachel Boedicker - Case Western Reserve University/HamSCI  Aidan Montare - NIST Boulder/HamSCI

Mike Lombardi, K0WWX, HamSCI member and Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Time Realization and Distribution Group published the article Measuring the Frequency Accuracy and Stability of WWV and WWVH in ARRL's March 2023 QST. WWV and WWVH are the United States' National Time and Frequency Standards broadcast stations and are of critical importance to the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station Project.

The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) will be conducting a research campaign on December 27, 2022, with transmissions between 1100-2300 UTC (0200-1400 AKST) on 9.6 MHz. Actual transmit times are highly variable based on real-time ionospheric conditions. All information is subject to change. Amateur radio operators are encouraged to listen for and record the echo of HAARP off of the asteroid and submit demodulated recordings in .wav or .mp3 format. See official HAARP press release for more information.

Congratulations to Dr. Kristina Collins, Ph.D., KD8OXT, who successfully passed her thesis defense on Friday, November 18, 2022, to earn her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University! Dr. Collins’ thesis is entitled Development Of A Low-Cost Meta-Instrument For Distributed Observations Of Ionospheric Variability and focuses on the development of the HamSCI Grape Personal Space Weather Station Network. For the past three years, Dr. Collins has been the funded Ph.D. student on the National Science Foundation Distributed Array of Small Instruments Personal Space Weather Station Project and been an important and influential leader in the HamSCI community. She currently serves on the HamSCI advisory board, leads the HamSCI Eclipse and Frequency Measurement Festivals project and WWV/H Scientific Modulation team, and served as chair of the local organizing committee for the 2019 HamSCI Workshop held at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Collins has been interviewed on the ARRL's Eclectic Tech Podcast, has peer-reviewed papers published in the American Geophysical Union's EOS magazine and IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, and has papers under review at Atmospheric Measurement Techniques and EGUSphere. Dr. Collins is excited to be joining the Space Science Institute in Spring 2023 as a postdoctoral research fellow through the NSF Office of Polar Programs. In her upcoming project at SSI, she will be developing sonification and mixed reality tools to explore magnetometer data. In addition to her radio and space science, she enjoys sailing, scuba diving, and film projection. She is also a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.

The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) will be conducting a research campaign from Oct. 19 to Oct. 28, with transmissions taking place between 1400-0600 UTC (see table below for details). Actual transmit days and times are highly variable based on real-time ionospheric conditions. All information is subject to change. This campaign will be the most scientifically diverse ever conducted at HAARP; some particularly notable experiments include a first-of-its-kind attempt to bounce a signal off of Jupiter, investigation into possible causes of the airglow phenomenon known as STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), and testing the feasibility of using radio transmissions to measure the interiors of near-Earth asteroids. Experiments benefiting from amateur radio support or having citizen science applications are described in the HAARP Letter to the Amateur Radio Community, along with known frequency information. An official HAARP press release is available from the University of Alaska Geophysical Institute.

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILED EXPERIMENT INFORMATION

Members of the HamSCI team are in Charlotte, North Carolina this Friday through Sunday to present at the ARRL-TAPR Digital Communications Conference (DCC). The ARRL-TAPR DCC is an annual conference that presents leading ideas related to amateur radio electrical engineering and related fields. This year, members of HamSCI will be presenting on topics related to the upcoming 2023 and 2024 solar eclipses, the development of the Personal Space Weather Station, including the Grape HF Doppler Receiver, VLF receiver, and TangerineSDR wideband receiver. Additional presentations include advances in analysis of Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances observed both with large-scale amateur radio reporting systems (RBN/WSPRNet/PSKReporter) and the Grape Personal Space Weather Station, as well as the initial public release of pyLap, the new open-source Python-based interface to the PHaRLAP HF ray tracing toolkit. The entire DCC is being live streamed via the TAPR Digital YouTube Channel. You can download the conference agenda here.