HamSCI member Ron Wilcox, KF7ZN, recently received the Utah DX Association’s 2023 Technical Achievement Award. The UDXA recognized Ron for promoting radio-related science topics to the amateur (ham) radio community.
HamSCI Announces Initial Observations From 14 October Annular Solar Eclipse—Encourages Amateur Participation in Upcoming 8 April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse QSO Party
Dr. Nathaniel Frissell W2NAF, Lead Organizer for HamSCI (The Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation) and assistant professor of physics and engineering at The University of Scranton W3USR, has announced initial observations from the October 14th annular solar eclipse across North America.
HamSCI proudly joined dozens of other citizen science project teams at NASA’s Science Activation (SciAct) / Citizen Science (CitSci) Community Workshop held in Leesburg, VA, November 13-17, 2023. Conference attendees, leaders in the volunteer citizen science community, shared project success stories and future plans for their science and education based teams.
The October, 2023 North American annular solar eclipse may be past, but media coverage of that event, an element of HamSCI's Festivals of Eclipse Ionospheric Science, will live on in a wide variety of informative features. Magazines, websites, NASA produced videos, local and national news coverage tell the story of how HamSCI citizen scientists and researchers are contributing to science.
HamSCI events were the topics of two recent articles appearing in American Radio Relay League (ARRL) publications. The October, 2023 issue of QST magazine featured a story entitled 'HamSCI Workshop 2023: A Radio Science Collaboration'. The Workshop was held at the University of Scranton in mid-March, and the article gave a synopsis of the presentations, poster sessions and other activities which took place during the two day event. QST is read by thousands of ARRL Members each month. It is the flagship journal of the ARRL. The September/October issue of On The Air carried a story on how and why an amateur radio operator would want to operate in HamSCI's Solar Eclipse QSO Parties. OTA a bi-monthly magazine aimed at those just getting into (or back into) the hobby of amateur radio.
Dozens of Grape Personal Space Weather Stations are now on the air, and the network is growing on a regular basis. In the last week, stations in Cleveland, OH and Jacksonville, FL were added to the Grape network. They were Node numbers 63 and 64, respectively. You can learn more about the Grape 1, including all of the details needed to build, operate and contribute data to the HamSCI PSWS Grape Server here. The full Grape story, with links to the Grape 1 and the up and coming Grape 2 are here on the HamSCI site.
More than 50 researchers will be in Alaska in August for the resumption of a science summer school that culminates with experiments at the High-frequency Active Aurora Research Program facility operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
The Polar Aeronomy and Radio Science Summer School was last held more than 10 years ago. Its return is provided for as part of a five-year $9.3 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to UAF in 2021. That funding allowed creation of the Subauroral Geophysical Observatory for Space Physics and Radio Science at HAARP. - Rod Boyce, University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute
Multiple members of the HamSCI Community contributed content to the new book Here to There: Radio Wave Propagation, recently published by the American Radio Relay League.
Book chapters include the following: Fundamentals of Radio Wave Propagation, The Sun and Solar Activity, Sky-Wave, or Ionospheric, Propagation, VHF and UHF Non-ionospheric Propagation, Propagation Predictions for HF Operation, VHF and UHF Mobile Propagation and Amateur Radio and Ionospheric Science.
