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.
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.
By Stan Zygmunt, University of Scranton
Registration is now open for the third annual HamSCI Workshop. The 2020 HamSCI Workshop for amateur radio operators and professional scientists will be held Friday and Saturday, March 20-21, at The University of Scranton. The theme of the workshop is “The Auroral Connection,” and will include addresses by guest speakers, poster presentations and demonstrations of relevant instrumentation and software. All ham radio operators, scientists, and people interested in ionospheric and space physics are welcome to attend.
The TangerineSDR is the TAPR-HamSCI joint project to create a software defined radio that meets the joint needs of the amateur and scientific communities. The TangerineSDR is slated to be at the heart of the high-performance version of the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station. In his January/February 2020 QEX article, TangerineSDR Chief Architect Scotty Cowling WA2DFI explains the requirements and use cases of the TangerineSDR. Full text of the article is availble here. Reprinted with permission; copyright ARRL.
This week, many HamSCI members are presenting their research at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco. 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.
Read more for a selected list of presentations by and/or of interest to HamSCI.
HamSCI has an opening for a Post-Doctoral Research Associate! Please see the advertisement below.
The University of Scranton Department of Physics and Engineering seeks a post-doctoral research associate starting in Spring/Summer 2020 in support of a recently awarded NSF-supported Distributed Array of Small Instruments (DASI) grant to develop a prototype Personal Space Weather Station. The successful post-doctoral researcher will conduct software development, and subsequent scientific studies, for a multi-site geographically distributed high frequency (HF; 3 – 30 MHz) software defined radio (SDR) network using signals of opportunity. Primary responsibilities will involve the development and implementation of an ionospheric sounding algorithm using the HF observation network for the purpose of studying geospace phenomena: traveling ionospheric disturbances, ionospheric responses to solar flares, geomagnetic storms and substorms, and other space weather effects. The ideal candidate will have expertise in ionospheric remote sensing, geospace physics including the ionosphere and thermosphere, and digital signal processing algorithm development and implementation.
A $1.3 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to University of Scranton physics and electrical engineering professor Nathaniel Frissell, Ph.D., seeks to harness the power of a network of licensed amateur radio operators to better understand and measure the effects of weather in the upper levels of Earth’s atmosphere. The highly-competitive grant awarded by NSF’s Aeronomy Program for the project titled Distributed Arrays of Small Instruments (DASI) will be implemented over a three-year period. As lead principal investigator, Dr. Frissell, a space physicist, will lead a collaborative team that will develop modular, multi-instrument, ground-based space science observation equipment and data collection and analysis software. He will also recruit multiple universities and ham radio users to operate the network of “Personal Space Weather Stations” developed.
As part of the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station project, TAPR is charged with developing a Scientific Software Defined Radio that operates from a few kHz up to 30 MHz with a focus on flexibility, high precision stability, and accurate time stamping. TAPR has taken this charge to develop the TangerineSDR, a modular software defined radio that will not only meet HamSCI's PSWS needs, but also many other applications. In the videos below, the chief architect of the TangerineSDR, Scotty Cowling, WA2DFI, shows off a mock-up of the new radio at the 39th Annual ARRL-TAPR Digital Communications Conference that took place in Detroit, MI from September 11-13, 2020. People who would like to participate in PSWS and TangerineSDR development are encouraged to visit tangerinesdr.com, join the TAPR TangerineSDR listserv, and join in the Monday night TeamSpeak telecons.
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
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.