Microwave Update (MUD) is an international conference dedicated to microwave equipment design, construction, and operation. It is focused on, but not limited to, amateur radio on the microwave bands. The Midwest VHF/UHF Society is pleased to host this year's event. The conference will be held at the Holiday Inn, 2800 Presidential Drive, Fairborn, Ohio 45324 from October 11 - 14, 2018.
The 2018 HamSCI Workshop held at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) February 23-24, 2018 brought together hams and space scientists from across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. With over 60 people in attendance, presentations included results from the 2017 Great American Eclipse, ideas for a personal space weather station, and other amateur radio-space science experiments and projects.
Registration for the 2018 HamSCI Workshop is now open! The workshop will be held February 23-24, 2018 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ and seeks to bring together the amateur radio community and professional scientists. Anyone interested in this workshop is invited to join. This year, the workshop will focus on results of the 2017 Great American Eclipse ham radio ionospheric experiments (including SEQP results) and the development of a Personal Space Weather station.
Using 6-meter QSO spot data from www.dxmaps.com, HamSCI member Joe Dzekevich, K1YOW, has found correlations of 6-meter sporadic E and Upper-Level Low pressure systems. His findings are now published in the December 2012 QST (reprinted with permission from the ARRL).
In his article, amateur radio is used to explore possible correlations between weather storm systems and sporadic E clouds to see if they are collocated. While some of the main causes of sporadic E propagation are wind shear, meteor strikes and upper atmospheric tides (ultimately coming from solar EUV energy inputs), radio operators have noticed that sporadic E propagation is also changed significantly by hurricanes and storms. Specific cases where K1YOW used amateur radio to investigate the effects of low pressure weather storms on the formation and/or enhancement of 6 meter sporadic E clouds are presented. DX Maps and earth wide weather model charts combined with operations on 6 meters are used to examine possible correlations between the location of the sporadic E clouds and the low pressure weather storm systems. Initial findings show a high degree of correlation when magnetic field strength is taken into consideration.
The Yasme Foundation announced this past week that Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF and Magda Moses, KM4EGE are winners of the 2017 Excellence Award for their role in starting HamSCI and organizing and promoting the Solar Eclipse QSO Party. From Yasme's Website, "The Yasme Excellence Awards are presented to individuals who through their own service, creativity, effort and dedication have made a significant contribution to amateur radio. The contribution may be in recognition of technical, operating or organizational achievement as all three are necessary for amateur radio to grow and prosper. These awards shall be given from time to time as the board feels appropriate."
We are inviting all hams and scientists interested in ham radio science to come to the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ for a HamSCI workshop on Friday, February 23 and Saturday, February 24, 2018. This aim of this workshop is to foster collaborations between the ham radio and the space science and space weather research communities through presentations, discussions, and demonstatrations. This year's meeting will focus on solar eclipse analysis, ham radio data sources and databases, and the development of a "personal space weather station". This meeting is open to all interested persons. If you are interested in attending, please fill out the HamSCI Workshop Interest Survey. Final registration details will be posted by December 2017.
A meeting bringing together both radio amateurs and radio scientists was held in the UK on the 13 October 2017, before the Radio Society Great Britain annual convention. This 'HamSCI' event, the first such meeting outside of the USA, was organized by Professor Cathryn Mitchell, M0IBG, (University of Bath) in association with her Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) Knowledge Exchange fellowship.
Members of HamSCI presented at the 36th Annual ARRL and TAPR Digital Communications Conference September 15-17, 2017 in St. Louis, Missouri. The TAPR/ARRL DCC is an annual conference that attracts technically-minded amateur radio operators who specialize in building and designing hardware and software to support digital communications and radio. In a presentation entitled HamSCI and the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse HamSCI members Nathaniel Frissell W2NAF, Bill Engelke AB4EJ, Josh Katz KD2JAO, Spencer Gunning K2AEM, and Josh Vega WB2JSV showed initial results of the Solar Eclipse QSO Party and other HamSCI eclipse experiements.
We've been contacted by several individuals regarding submission of observations of effects during the eclipse to HamSCI recently. Any such material - logs, reception reports, and records of other observations - is welcomed by HamSCI. We encourage you to email these to hamsci@hamsci.org.
Larger data sets - raw I/Q data recordings or large audio files, for instance - can be submitted to the HamSCI community on Zenodo if they are too large to email. Create an account there to do this, or log in with your GitHub or ORCID account to do so. Zenodo has a 50GB limit per data set, so those of you who recorded multiple bands may need to submit each band as a separate data set. Thank you to everyone who took part in this and submitted observations of any kind!
After eight short hours, the Solar Eclipse QSO Party has come to a close. Particpation was quite good. Although the final numbers are not yet in, preliminary reports show that over 670,000 spots were detected by the RBN, and over 542,000 spots were reported to PSKReporter during the SEQP. These numbers will increase as data is processed. SEQP participants are requested to submit their logs and RBN data (spots.txt) to hamsci.org/seqp. A PDF Certificate of Participation will be provided on log submission.
