RSID: <<2021-02-12T00:31Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>

Welcome to program 191 of Shortwave Radiogram.

I'm Kim Andrew Elliott in Arlington, Virginia USA.

Here is the lineup for today's program, in MFSK modes as noted:

  1:38 MFSK32: Program preview (now)
  2:43 MFSK64: Ham radio's global space weather sensor network*
14:48 This week's images*
25:11 World Radio Day "soundtrack" and logo*
28:14 MFSK32: Closing announcements

* with image(s)


Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

Twitter: @SWRadiogram


 

RSID: <<2021-02-12T00:33Z MFSK-64 @ 9265000+1500>>

From Eos:

Ham Radio Forms a Planet-Sized Space Weather Sensor Network

For researchers who monitor the effects of solar activity
on Earth's atmosphere, telecommunications, and electrical
utilities, amateur radio signals a golden age of
crowdsourced science.

Kristina Collins, David Kazdan, and Nathaniel A. Frissell
9 February 2021

Space weather events, triggered by solar emissions and their
interactions with Earth's atmosphere, can have significant
effects on communications and navigation technology and on
electric power systems. As with terrestrial weather events, the
economic impacts of space weather–related disruptions can be
substantial, affecting satellite systems as well as systems on
the ground. A severe geomagnetic storm (on the order of the
Carrington Event of 1859) could have a catastrophic effect on
modern infrastructure. Even solar storms of more ordinary size
can induce currents in the power grid that drive up energy
prices, affecting manufacturing and commerce.

Considerable interest exists in developing space weather
forecasting technologies that use Earth's ionosphere as a sensor
for events in its neighboring atmospheric layers. The ionosphere
occupies a privileged niche in the geospace system, as it is
coupled into both the terrestrial weather of the neutral
atmosphere below and the space weather of the magnetosphere
above.

Although we have a good understanding of ionospheric
climate—diurnal and seasonal variations are well known, as are
the rhythms of the sunspot cycle—there are new and vital areas of
research to be explored. For example, it is known that the
ionosphere—and near-Earth space—experiences variability (e.g.,
radio signals can fade in and out over periods of seconds,
minutes, or hours due to changes in ionospheric electron
densities along signal propagation paths), but this variability
has not been sampled or studied adequately on regional and global
scales.

To fully understand variability on small spatial scales and short
timescales, the scientific community will require vastly larger
and denser sensing networks that collect data on continental and
global scales. With open-source instrumentation cheaper and more
plentiful than ever before, the time is ripe for amateur
scientists to take distributed measurements of the ionosphere—and
the amateur radio community is up for the challenge.

The Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) is a
collective that unites amateur radio operators with the research
community in the space and atmospheric sciences. This
confederation of scientists, engineers, and hobbyists holds
annual workshops during which ham radio operators and space
scientists share findings. A new HamSCI effort, the Personal
Space Weather Station project, aims to develop a robust and
scalable network of amateur stations that will allow amateurs to
collect useful data for space science researchers. The next
HamSCI workshop will be held virtually 19–21 March 2021, and it
will focus on midlatitude ionospheric measurements.

A Ready-Made Volunteer Science Community

From a communications point of view, the electromagnetic spectrum
is a finite resource. Signals from broadcasting,
telecommunications, and navigation all have their own demands of
bandwidth and range. Spectrum allocations are managed by
government agencies, such as the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) in the United States. Most countries allot some
of the available spectrum to amateur users for the purposes of
recreation, experimentation, and the promotion of international
goodwill. There are more than 760,000 licensed amateur radio
operators and uncounted shortwave listeners in the United States
alone.

Amateur radio operators have an empirical knowledge of space
weather because they want to know when and on what frequencies
they can establish communications—and when and where they cannot.
Changes in the ionosphere like those caused by the day–night
transition or by solar activity can impede or aid communications
on various frequencies. For example, the 20-meter band (14–14.35
megahertz) usually has its longest transcontinental reach during
daylight hours, but the 40-meter band (7–7.3 megahertz) often
works best at night. Amateur radio frequency allocations are
distributed throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, enabling
useful propagation experiments for any frequency range.

In the pursuit of the hobby, many an amateur operator (or "ham")
has experienced hearing the high-frequency (HF) bands (3–30
megahertz) go quiet right after sunset or has swapped frequencies
to reach a distant station. Hams greatly value forecasts of space
weather conditions and real-time information about propagation,
and the community has a high level of scientific literacy on the
topic. Resources like spaceweather.com and a weekly podcast by
Tamitha Skov (the "Space Weather Woman," whose amateur call sign
is WX6SWW) are regularly consulted today by hams looking to
achieve a distant contact.

Ham radio is currently experiencing a technical renaissance,
thanks to the advent of inexpensive single-board computing
platforms (a complete computer built onto a single circuit board,
such as a Raspberry Pi) and open-source software. Such
computer-based systems serve as virtual radio repeaters,
connecting computers via the Internet to actual ham radios in the
real world to enable remote control and data collection. Beyond
the old-fashioned pursuit of voice communication, the lure of
maker movement projects and the removal of the Morse code
requirement from the amateur licensing exam have led to a greater
number of licensed amateurs than ever before.

Out of this increasing technical sophistication, digital
communications networks, such as the Automatic Packet Reporting
System (APRS), the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR), and
the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN), enjoy wide membership and serve
the amateur community while collecting propagation data at rates
and resolutions that were previously impossible. The reach of
these crowdsourced systems, and the support of the amateur
community, offers tremendous opportunities for scientific
measurements.

One such measurement took place at sunset on 17 October 2017,
when amateur station W8EDU in Cleveland transmitted the Morse
code for "TEST TEST TEST DE W8EDU W8EDU W8EDU" on frequencies in
the 20-, 40-, and 80-meter bands. A map of the automated
listening stations in the RBN that picked up, or "spotted," this
signal shows all of the spots with extant propagation paths. In
this case, the result clearly shows that the 40-meter paths go
primarily to the nightside of the terminator (the moving boundary
between regions in daylight and those in darkness), and the
20-meter paths primarily to the dayside.

For amateur operators, this is a useful tool for determining the
reach of one's signals: A ham might say that "there's a path into
Europe opening up on 40 meters" and listen for the call signs of
European stations. Or, if operators want to reach a station in
South America, they might rotate their antenna by 90° and try
running an RBN test again.

Harnessing the Data for Science

How can ham radio signals tell scientists about energy and
particles originating in the Sun and traveling millions of miles
through space? The answer lies in the ionosphere, the electrified
atmospheric region that can refract radio signals back to Earth.
This is a complex region heavily influenced by the solar wind,
extreme ultraviolet ionizing radiation, and geomagnetic
disturbances, and even by the lower and middle neutral
atmosphere.

From the perspective of scientists studying the ionosphere, ham
radio data become most interesting in aggregate. All the data in
the RBN, from 2009 to the present, are archived at
reversebeacon.net and can be freely downloaded. For scale, the
earlier-referenced Cleveland transmission represented only a
small subset of the 168,713 radio spots that were recorded on 17
October 2017, each one representing a propagation path between
two points on a given frequency at a given time.

HamSCI encouraged amateur operators to generate data on the RBN
during the North American eclipse of 2017. Later analysis
confirmed that the RBN data were consistent with physics-based
ionospheric models, indicating the promise of this system for
collecting propagation data.

A further advantage of collecting data through the amateur
community is that these observations tend to naturally fulfill
the requirements of FAIR data: findable, accessible,
interoperable, and reusable. Amateur operators are prohibited by
the strictures of licensure from earning money through the act of
operating, so most data used by operators are open and accessible
at their creation. Because much of the amateur community is
technically literate, databases and records are structured around
machine readability. Most important, amateur radio has a global
and persistent identifier woven into the metadata of every
recorded contact: Each licensed operator or club has a unique
call sign, tied to a physical address in its respective
government database.

"At the Tone, the Time Will Be ..."

Just outside Fort Collins, Colo., lies the heartbeat of the
electromagnetic communications spectrum—and one key to precision
measurements of the interactions between ham radio and solar
weather. The sound of radio station WWV, the time and frequency
standard of the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
is familiar to any shortwave listener. It is the oldest
continuously operating radio station in the United States, having
been on the air since 1919. Today WWV and its sister station WWVH
in Hawaii broadcast the familiar "At the tone, the time will be
..." message on 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 megahertz, with the
frequencies calibrated to at least nine significant digits.

These stations supply listeners with standardized time
information, high-seas weather forecasts, and other programming.
Station WWVB, located at the same Colorado site, transmits on
0.060 megahertz and provides timing information to
radio-controlled "atomic" clocks. In recent months, WWV's
precise, cesium-controlled carrier has found another use as a
beacon for ionospheric measurements.

Radio signals provide a window into the changing ionosphere. The
various signals from WWV, reflecting off the ionosphere, undergo
changes in path length as the ionospheric electron density
profile changes. This results in changes to the observed
frequency of radio signals at receiving points, akin to the rise
and fall in pitch of a passing train whistle.
Illustration of a radio signal reflecting off the ionosphere

Comparing the received radio signal with a precision local
frequency standard, such as a GPS-disciplined oscillator, allows
a user to measure these ionospherically induced frequency shifts.
This measurement is prepared and recorded with open-source
software. Numerous data sets recorded simultaneously from
multiple locations offer information—when these data sets are
examined both individually and collectively—about the ionosphere
at the time the data are taken. This information includes the
movements of traveling ionospheric disturbances and other
important phenomena at various scales.

The Festival of Frequency Measurement

On 1 October 2019, HamSCI celebrated the centennial of WWV with a
Festival of Frequency Measurement. HamSCI issued an open call to
amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners to gather Doppler
shift data, and about 50 stations responded. We presented the
results of this experiment at AGU's Fall Meeting 2019, and the
data from the experiment are freely available. These data are
rich with signatures of ionospheric dynamics, including coherent
wave-like disturbances with periodicities at night of about an
hour. The observations are more quiescent during the day. The
results will also be summarized in an upcoming paper in IEEE
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

WWV was never intended to provide these data, but the station's
exceptional precision, high power, and guaranteed continuous
availability make it a perfect beacon. Thanks to the advent of
inexpensive GPS-disciplined oscillators and single-board
computers, amateur scientists can assemble complete prototype
systems to collect such data for less than $200, or they can
build systems from existing equipment. Thus, the amateur
community, mobilized on a national scale, can generate a
large-scale, novel data set for ionospheric study.

Data collection campaigns during the solar eclipses of 2020
demonstrated the potential for scientists to engage with the
amateur community. Dubbed the Eclipse Festivals, these events
followed the template of the WWV centennial event on a global
scale, using 10-megahertz time standard stations. The June 2020
Eclipse Festival, built around the annular solar eclipse across
eastern Africa and Asia on 21 June, ran for 3 days and included
volunteer participation from 50 stations in 19 countries. The
December 2020 Eclipse Festival, a 7-day campaign built around the
total solar eclipse across South America on 14 December, drew
data submissions from over 80 stations. Both were advertised
through the same channels used for radiosport contests and other
events. The strong participation in these events demonstrates the
community's interest in community science and the potential for
deployment in science campaigns.

Making Space Weather Personal

The personal weather station has become a familiar fixture for
meteorologists. Stations belonging to hobbyists, networked
through sites like Weather Underground, provide a dense
constellation of sensors reporting air temperature and pressure
as well as precipitation. We have better knowledge of terrestrial
weather because of these networks, but no such system exists yet
for ionospheric weather.

Through HamSCI, ham radio operators and researchers are bridging
this gap by designing hardware for a distributed network of
personal space weather stations (PSWSs), accessible to
professional and amateur scientists alike. These stations come in
two varieties: a low-cost model designed only for observations
like those performed during the Festival of Frequency
Measurement, and the more powerful, software-defined radio
TangerineSDR, a wideband receiver that can be reconfigured for a
range of experiments. At the core of both is a single-board
computer, which interfaces with a set of modular instruments
(e.g., a magnetometer) and uploads data to a central database.

These stations are in the prototyping and testing stage, with
plans to deploy a network of PSWSs in the next 3 years in time to
record the upcoming 2024 solar eclipse across North America. As
the Moon's shadow travels across Earth's surface, it will shield
the radio stations below from solar extreme ultraviolet
radiation, providing an excellent opportunity to collect baseline
radio data. We hope to have the network up and running in time
for Festival of Frequency Measurement 2024, and we invite hams to
join in as volunteer scientists to help improve our understanding
of Earth's space environment.

https://eos.org/features/ham-radio-forms-a-planet-sized-space-weather-sensor-network


Image: Logo of HamSCI, the Ham Radio Science Citizen
Investigation, hamsci.org ...

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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64.

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net.
 

Part of The Atlantic's "Superb Owl" pictorial on the day of the
Super Bowl, a Sumatran owl is seen in Palembang City in South
Sumatra, Indonesia. https://bit.ly/3b9uASD ...

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A one-inch larval lionfish (an invasive species) off the coast of
Florida. https://bit.ly/3a99a8y ...

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A snow-covered tree in Fairfax, Virginia, February 7. The dark
speck at the top is a blue heron. https://bit.ly/2Z6abbf ...

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Our painting of the week is a Zenith K725 Mid (20th) Century
Radio by Raymond Logan. https://bit.ly/3pagt4c ..

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February 13 is (was) UNESCO's World Radio Day. We close with the
World Radio Day "Soundtrack" by Chapelier Fou, and the WRD 2021
logo. More information at worldradioday.org.

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RSID: <<2021-02-12T00:58Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>
 

This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK32 ...

 

Shortwave Radiogram is transmitted by:

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Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

Twitter: @SWRadiogram or twitter.com/swradiogram

I'm Kim Elliott. Please join us for the next Shortwave
Radiogram.

RSID: <<2021-02-11T02:50Z MFSK-64 @ 5850000+1500>>