If you’ve come to https://k9la.us because of your interest in propagation, the following is a mini-guided tour to help you navigate to the material you’re interested in. The home page gives a basic introduction, and new items and relevant old items are listed here (usually at the beginning of each month). On the left side of the home page are links that contain material specific to certain aspects of propagation in our Amateur Radio hobby. The Monthly Feature link offers articles about a myriad of topics. These topics are often tied to observations of ionospheric propagation and measurements of solar and ionospheric data. Some important topics that have been covered are the new sunspot numbers (the April 2016 document), the ongoing study of gravity waves and travelling ionospheric disturbances (the March 2020 document) and a look at propagation on our 630-meter and 2200-meter bands (the December 2018 document). As a side note, many HamSCI participants are involved in the gravity wave/TIDs studies.
The 2020 HamSCI Workhop will go on! We are moving to an all-digital workshop using Zoom Webinar Services. Registration and participation is free and open to all. Exact details on how to register and participate will be posted to hamsci.org/hamsci2020 no later than Wednesday, March 18th. To prepare and make sure you are ready to participate in the 2020 HamSCI Workshop, please visit the Zoom Website and create free account.
As of March 11, 2020, we have continued to monitor the coronavirus situation and find that it is no longer feasible to hold an in-person HamSCI workshop this year. This has been a very difficult decision to make, as a tremendous amount of planning and effort by many people have gone into preparing for the workshop. We will refund all registrations for this event. Please take this time to cancel any travel arrangements you may have made to attend the workshop.
HamSCI and the Case Amateur Radio Club W8EDU is sponsoring a distributed experiment during the WWV 100th anniversary celebrations. The Festival of Frequency Measurement invites all interested to record WWV's 5 MHz carrier for the UTC day 1 October 2019--and then to upload the resulting data file. Amateur radio operators, shortwave listeners, physics laboratories, and anyone else with a radio receiver and computer may part
By Nathaniel A. Frissell (W2NAF), Philip J. Erickson (W1PJE), Ethan S. Miller (K8GU), William Liles (NQ6Z), Kristina Collins (KD8OXT), David Kazdan (AD8Y), and Nathaniel Vishner (KB1QHX)
Photo by Laura Gooch (N8NFE)
The Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) is an international collective of professional researchers and amateur radio operators working together to simultaneously advance the fields of space science and amateur (ham) radio activities. The 2nd US HamSCI meeting was held March 22-23, 2019, organized by Nathaniel Frissell of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and hosted by the Case Amateur Radio Club (Case ARC) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, OH. The theme of this year’s meeting was “Ionospheric Effects and Sensing,” which includes the use of amateur radio techniques for the characterization and observational study of ionospheric phenomena such as traveling ionospheric disturbances, sporadic E, response to solar flares, geomagnetic storms, and other space weather events.
HamSCI will again be at the Dayton Hamvention as part of the new Ham Radio 2.0: Innovation and Discovery area sponsored by the Yasme Foundation. Come visit the HamSCI Booth and Forum to learn about projects on the cutting edge of ham radio science and engineering research, including new directions in Sporadic E research, causes of F region ionospheric variability, how propagation works on the new 630 and 2200 m bands, the Personal Space Weather Station, and more. Hamvention will be held May 17-19, 2019 at the Greene County Fairgrounds in Xenia, Ohio.
This week, many HamSCI members are presenting their research at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. The AGU Fall meeting is one of the largest geoscience meetings in the world, and consists of about 24,000 attendees. The scientific program includes sessions pertaining to all areas of geophysics, including space weather, the solar wind, auroral activity, the ionosphere, and the neutral atmosphere. Below is a list of selected presentations and sessions being given by HamSCI members, or of general interest to ham radio operators. The complete scientific program is available here.
In the spirit of making data from the Radio Receiver Instrument (RRI) onboard Swarm-E (formally known as e-POP) more accessible to the ham radio community, we have converted RRI's data into a ".raw" format so that it can be ingested into open source software such as Gqrx or GNU Radio. We have done this for all RRI data related to the 2015, 2017, and 2018 ARRL Field Days. We encourage everyone to help us identify hams in RRI's signal. You can use the Gqrx tool discussed here, or you can use your own technique. If you decode a ham's call sign, if you would like to share your technique, or if you have any comments or suggestion contact us and let us know! To help organize your findings, you can download a spreadhseet containing that you can fill out and send to us. Feel free to create your own spreadsheet or modify this one.