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Ham Radio Forms a Planet-Sized Space Weather Sensor Network

179 points| sohkamyung | 5 years ago |eos.org | reply

31 comments

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[+] gravypod|5 years ago|reply
Wow! I never expected to see some of my work on HN. I'm coauthor on https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL077324. I worked under Nathaniel Frissell (an amazing and inspiring person) when he was a post-doc at NJIT. Was a lot of fun. If anyone wants to contribute getting a HAM radio license and setting up a transmitter on http://wsprnet.org/ is a great contribution to a huge dataset. Setting up a an RBN receiver is also a fun activity if you're interested in that.

Also the google group is pretty active and has some VERY smart people on it: https://groups.google.com/g/hamsci

[+] durkie|5 years ago|reply
any particular recommendations for resources beginners to get in to ham radio these days? specific radios or web resources. i hear that the radios have improved dramatically in the past few years.

my dad was really in to ham radio when I was a kid and was always setting up huge antennas in our backyard and had lots of big mysterious black metal boxes with vu meters and nice big knobs of them. i remember him making a phone call to my mom via ham radio during the 80s and it blew my mind.

[+] earthscienceman|5 years ago|reply
Huh. This is really cool. In Nathaniel's bio he mentions connects to the variability of the Polar vortex but I can't seem to find a paper where he talks about this. Could you point me in the right direction? I study atmospheric transport, cyclones, and other phenomena at the surface in the Arctic and connections to the Polar vortex are always important to me.

NVM. I finally found it:

https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JA022168

[+] dahlberg|5 years ago|reply
I passed this along to Philip of pskreporter.info as he'll certainly find it fascinating as well!
[+] jes|5 years ago|reply
I have been enjoying amateur radio for about five or so months now. I'm about to take another license exam, to move from a Technician license to a General license.

I think it's a great hobby. At 61, I started learning about electronics when hollow-state devices were common and solid-state devices were still relatively new. It's been interesting to see how electronics have evolved over the years.

I'm hoping to pick up a nice ICOM radio when I pass my General exam in a couple of weeks. I'm also in the process of buying some land in Eastern Washington, in part to have a place where I can put up some HF antennas. Right now I only have space for a 2m Yagi on my back patio.

John, KJ7RDV

[+] daveevad|5 years ago|reply
I encourage anyone interested in getting licensed to study the flashcards [1]. These are the exact same questions on the exam. You can memorize and pass the technician test with about 10 hours of study. An intro level amateur radio costs about $100.

[1] - https://hamexam.org/flash_cards/15-Technician

[+] brodouevencode|5 years ago|reply
The idea of another Carrington Event scares me. All of our modern lives piggy back on an attachment to power and communications. Going without such for even a few days would devolve the first world into chaos.
[+] sharker8|5 years ago|reply
My local repeater has become overrun with political conversations of the right wing racist variety. Too bad because I used to really enjoy ham as a hobby.
[+] hereforphone|5 years ago|reply
Interesting, my local repeaters were full of liberal activists