CWRU Student Monitors WWVH from South America During Recent Eclipse
CWRU Student Monitors WWVH from South America During Recent Eclipse
Case Western Reserve University Electrical Engineering master's degree student Maris Usis worked with Falkland Island hams and traveled to a remote area of Patagonian Chile, to monitor WWVH (Kauai, Hawaii) during the recent Pacific Ocean / South American solar eclipse.
The October 2, 2024 eclipse path was mostly over the south Pacific Ocean, with landfall only in Easter Island, southern South America, and the Falkland Islands. Maris supplied amateur station VP8ADR/VP8BDR in Falkland Islands with equipment, which Bobby and Lyn Short set up for eclipse data collection and internet upload to Maris' server in Cleveland. The Shorts then returned to their spring task of shearing the 20,000 sheep on their 200,000 acre ranch. (Radio engineers and ionospheric physicists find help where it is to be found.) The Walker Creek Farm station is shown here:
Maris recorded WWVH with Case Amateur Radio Club equipment he personally carried to Tortel, the only town in Patagonian Chile, after an eleven-hour gravel road drive from the nearest airport. The antennas, receivers, and microcomputers were set up on the hilltops near Tortel, shown in a photo he took the morning of the eclipse. He sent along one eclipse photo (below), taken during a spare moment while he was managing the radios and computers.
The data will be examined for propagation changes on three of WWVH's frequencies, 5, 10, and 15 MHz, as the moon's shadow distorted the ionosphere in mid-Pacific. Maris will be presenting the work at the annual scientific meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December, in Washington, DC. The monitoring experiment was very similar to that performed by CWRU students on April 8, 2024, when they, and other school/college stations, were monitoring CHU along the path of the North American eclipse.
