News Articles

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 Foundation, TAPR, the National Science Foundation, NASA, 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.

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.

HamSCI submitted two white papers to the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024-2033. The first white paper, entitled Amateur Radio: An Integral Tool for Atmospheric, Ionospheric, and Space Physics Research and Operations, discusses the technical capabilities of the amateur radio community and the open scientific questions and space weather operational needs that can be addressed with these capabilities. The second paper, Fostering Collaborations with the Amateur Radio Community, talks about how the professional science space science community and the amateur radio community can work together for mutual benefit and provides recommendations for fostering this relationship. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is the body in the United States charged with setting the highest level science priorities for the United States. Every 10 years, the NAS conducts a decadal survey of the community to help set these priorities. This current Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) will be the guiding document for space science research and operations for NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and congress from 2024-2033.

A new study by Sam Lo et al. from the Centre for Space at the University of Bath entitled "A Systematic Study of 7 MHz Greyline Propagation Using Amateur Radio Beacon Signals" was just published in the peer-reviewed journal Atmosphere. Abstract: This paper investigates 7 MHz ionospheric radio wave propagation between pairs of distant countries that simultaneously lie on the terminator. This is known as greyline propagation. Observations of amateur radio beacon transmitters recorded in the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) database are used to investigate the times of day that beacon signals were observed during the year 2017. The WSPR beacon network consists of thousands of automated beacon transmitters and observers distributed over the globe. The WSPR database is a very useful resource for radio science as it offers the date and time at which a propagation path was available between two radio stations, as well as their precise locations. This paper provides the first systematic study of grey-line propagation between New Zealand/Eastern Australia and UK/Europe. The study shows that communications were predominantly made from the United Kingdom (UK) to New Zealand at around both sunset and sunrise times, whereas from New Zealand to the UK, communication links occurred mainly during UK sunrise hours. The lack of observations at the UK sunset time was particularly evident during the UK summer. The same pattern was found in the observations of propagation from Eastern Australia to UK, and from New Zealand and Eastern Australia to Italy and the surrounding regions in Europe. The observed asymmetry in reception pattern could possibly be due to the increase in electromagnetic noise across Europe in the summer afternoon/evening from thunderstorms. URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/13/8/1340

Congratulations to Sam Lo and the entire team!

Dr. Frank Howell K4FMH will present a seminar based on his two-part article in the July & August 2022 issues of the Radio Society of Great Britain’s RadCom journal, written with Dr. Scott McIntosh of NCAR in Colorado, titled, “On the Cusp of a Scientific Revolution?” The seminar includes the latest theory construction and model estimation. The seminar will be held on September 1, 2022 at 4 PM Eastern (2000z) during the weekly Solar Eclipse QSO Party Zoom Telecon. Frank is Professor Emeritus at Mississippi State University, Affiliated Faculty at Emory University, and a scientific member of HamSCI.