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we go, welcome to everyone it's time for ham
talk live episode number 279 the Antarctic Eclipse
Festival of Frequency Measurement recorded live
on Thursday November 4th 2021 I'm your host Neil
Rapp WB9VPG thanks for tuning in to this episode
of ham talk live tonight we're joined by Christina
Collins KD8OXT and Dr. Nathaniel Frisell, W2NAF,
and we will take your calls live in just a few
minutes. Last week here on the show, we were
talking about the Collegiate Amateur Radio Initiative
with Andy Malusi, KK4LWR, and Tony Malusi. KD8RTT.
So if you missed that show, you can listen anytime
over at HamTalkLive .com or on your favorite
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you can catch the rebroadcast of HamTalk Live
every Saturday afternoon on WTWW. That's 508.
five on your a .m. dial that's usually about
3 30 p .m. eastern time when they play the rebroadcast
there so thanks to WTWW for allowing us to be
on their airwaves as well okay so later on tonight
we've got a couple of giveaways that we're going
to do so be sure you hang around for that But
we're going to talk to Christina and Nathaniel
first. So if you have a question, get it ready
to go. Let me give you the telephone number.
And after a while, after the next commercial
break, we will open up the phone lines and take
your comments and questions. And here is the
phone number to have ready. It is 859. nine eight
two seventy three seventy three again eight five
nine nine eight two seventy three seventy three
have that number written down punched in Whatever
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You can also tweet us. We're at ham talk live
Over on Twitter. So I'll be back with Christina
and Nathaniel right after this word from tower
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and you can visit them anytime From the comfort
of your own home at PL -259 .com Welcome back
to ham talk live tonight Christina Collins KD8OXT
and dr. Nathaniel Frisell W2NAF join us On the
Orlando Amateur Radio Club and hamcation hotline,
Christina Collins, KD8OXT is an electrical engineering
graduate student at Case Western Reserve University
in Cleveland, Ohio. She's been an officer of
the W8EDU Case Western Reserve Amateur Radio
Club for several years. and she's in charge of
this event that we're going to be talking about
tonight. She's in charge of gathering up all
the data. It's HamSci's Antarctic Eclipse Festival
of Frequency Measurement coming next month to
a radio near you. Also with us is the lead of
HamSci, Dr. Nathaniel Frisell, W2NAF. He is an
assistant professor at the University of Scranton
in physics, where he teaches digital signal processing,
fundamental physics and electromagnetics. He's
the lead organizer of HamSci, a project that
explores how amateur radio can help us understand
more about the physics of the ionosphere. Nathaniel
completed his PhD in electrical engineering.
in 2016 at Virginia Tech and worked with the
super darn HF radar lab there and was named the
2019 Hamvention amateur of the year. So welcome
Christina and welcome back, Nathaniel. Thank
you very much. Thank you. Well, Nathaniel, it's
great to have you back here with us. You've come
up with a lot of really interesting ham radio
physics studies and bagged some major grant money
for some of that. And so we're going to talk
about one of these events tonight, but you're
kind of handing this one off to Christina. And
so she's working finishing up her doctorate as
well so let's let's let Christina answer and
then we'll let Nathaniel jump in here in a little
bit but Christina first just tell us about the
eclipse itself that's going to be taking place
next month because you know there hasn't been
a whole lot of talk about that because we're
not going to see it so Tell us about the eclipse
and what you hope to measure with your ham radio
observations. Absolutely. Thank you, Neil. So
the, the eclipse is going to be on December 4th
and it will be over Antarctica this year, which
is a, uh, a relatively unusual spot for an eclipse
to be all things considered. If you go to timeanddate
.com they have a really fantastic eclipse calendar
and you can see when various eclipses will cross
over your path of totality. We started getting
interested in this around case because we have
the big eclipse coming up in 2024. that will
be in totality for here at Cleveland, Ohio. Or
as we like to say around W8EDU, we paid handsomely
to ensure that case would be in totality for
this and MIT would not. So as to why this is
an interesting thing. So as a ham radio operator,
right, you work HF, you're used to the idea that
radio waves during the day and at night are different,
that you get propagation paths that disappear
when the sun goes down or that come out at night
and things like that. And even if it's just when
you were going through, I think it's on the general
exam that they have a lot of it. You will have
seen all of the stuff about the different layers
of the ionosphere and their different behaviors.
And all of the effects that are associated with
the terminator, the gray line, that line between
night and day that passes over the surface of
the earth. So as a general, simple model of this...
One moment, I must move my cat here. He was so
quiet and then he decided to be on the keyboard.
Yes. Go Oscar, shoo. Do something cat -like.
All right. Thank you. So, uh, so as a simple
model of this, um, the, uh, the sun ionizes electrons
in the ionosphere and it changes what we use
a, a simple, um, derived component of that that
we call the virtual height. So we have a model
of the ionosphere that's like a mirror. And this
is not so very different from the models that
have been used since the very beginning of ionospheric
physics. The big difference is that now we have
precision timing. And we have GPS disciplined
oscillators and Raspberry Pis and all of these
wonderful bits of inexpensive instrumentation
and the ability to connect to people in the ham
radio and shortwave listening community to make
observations of these things. So the solar eclipse
is something that's worth characterizing because
it's the closest thing that you get to being
able to do a controlled experiment in space where
you have this bit of darkness that goes over
an area that's normally in daylight. And there
are many interesting scientific papers on effects
of this on the ionosphere. If you look at research
being done from the 2017 eclipse and the, for
instance, the GPS measurements of total electron
content that show bow waves. And there's all
sorts of things about that. So what we're working
on with these, where we have about two solar
eclipses a year that are well positioned around
the globe for science, is an opportunity to kind
of engage the global community and to also use
these as pilot experiments for the personal space
weather station, which is Ham's size flagship
product. So the general procedure that we use
for the experiment is that you do, you know,
the same thing that you might do if you're used
to the frequency measuring test where you are
listening for the movement of a carrier signal
from a time standard station such as WWV or WWVH.
And I'll make a note here that your listeners
may want to tune into those stations at either
8 or 48 minutes past the hour sometime in the
next few weeks. But yes, so when you listen to
that station, right, that signal leaves the transmitter
at precisely, you know, let's say 10 .000, one
part and 10 to the 12th, precision megahertz.
And when it arrives at your receiver, it will
have changed a little bit in frequency. And if
you record this over the course of the day, you
can actually see that there is a fairly typical
daily trend that has all of these other noise
components layered on top of it that is the Doppler
shift associated with that day -night transition
that is familiar to us when we're operating HF.
So we did a pilot experiment with this, with
WWV for the centennial of that station in 2019.
And we published on that in the IEEE, let's see,
it was GRSL, that's Geoscience, gosh, I should
remember the... title of this journal. You can
find the paper online. It was called Citizen
Scientists Collect Distributed Doppler Measurement
for Ionospheric Remote Sensing. And this was
about 50 ham radio operators who helped us out
with collecting data for this. And if you go
to that Geoscience and Remote Sensing letters,
there we go. If you go to that and you check
out figure three, you'll see the stacked plot
that shows the frequency graphs for all of these
ham stations. And it shows you how you can get
a snapshot of the ionosphere with many distributed
stations in a way that has not really been done
before using a citizen science network. And the
ham radio community, as it turns out, is extremely
well positioned to do this type of work because
you have a lot of people who already know how
to do radio, things in general. who are technically
literate and who are often willing to volunteer
their time and their equipment to conduct large
experiments. So as we're transitioning from this
model of doing this one campaign to the personal
space weather station where people would have
dedicated hardware, eclipses, because of the
fact that they're already on the calendar and
you're not going to be able to move them. and
because they're, of course, you know, quite visually
spectacular and they kind of, you know, engage
that natural component of international collaboration,
these make ideal pilot experiments for the different
aspects of the personal space weather station
that we want to learn about and test. So the
instrumentation thing that I'm hoping to test
out for this experiment, this is a project of
three senior project students here at Case. And
they have been working on a piece of audio recording
software, which we've been calling Snash. Actually,
there are four senior project students, I'm sorry.
There's Martin Bui, Daniel Warner. Shiv, I don't
actually know your last name, sorry Shiv, and
Zach Kadish, and they have been developing a
piece of audio recording software that is intended
for distributed citizen science recording for
this type of thing. So this was a need that we
only discovered because we had previous experiments
where people were recording with audacity and
we were finding that it wasn't a good surveillance
reporter and things like that. And so each of
these campaigns, we add another component, we
develop some new thing that we can use to collect
data or we look at the different observations
that we've had and use those things to enhance
the development of the personal space weather
station. I should note that... Yeah, let's talk
a little bit about the equipment that people
will need If they're going to try to help, what
kind of equipment are they going to need? What
do they need to do? How do they sign up? How
does that happen? Absolutely. So the first thing
to do is to go to hamsci .org slash festivals
and that has all of the Eclipse Festival pages.
You can find the one for the Antarctic Eclipse
Festival and then sign up for the mailing list
and I'll be sending out updates on there. The
only thing that you need to take part in the
experiment is the same thing that you need for
the Festival of Frequency Measurement, which
is an HF radio connected to a computer and audio
recording software like the ones that we are
prototyping or whatever you happen to have on
hand. And we'll be taking those audio recordings
and processing them to look at the change in
frequency over time. You'll want to listen to
whatever your favorite time standard station
is. In the United States, you'll probably tune
into WWV, but there's also RWM in Russia, there's
BPM in China. In South America, they have some
really excellent call signs. They have PPE and
they have LOL. in Argentina. It's a good one.
I think BPM is probably still my favorite, but
LOL is a good one. That one actually was turned
on partway through the December 2020 Eclipse
Festival when we had the path of totality across
South America. Generally, we've got some procedures,
some things to try. And for this particular event,
it's a, you set things up and you make a recording
and then you send in the data and we'll be putting
it through the high performance computing cluster
here at CASE to extract the frequency data from
all of these data sets. Because we want to be
able to try out different algorithms. So that's
why we record audio data rather than doing what
we did for the first experiment, which was to
use fldigi to just make an estimation of the
frequency for each operator. So it takes a while
to get the data processed. That's the only downside
of going to audio. But we've learned a lot from
it about how to set things up for the personal
space weather station, how to do science with
other ham radio operators in the same area. And
you can run a Doppler experiment on your own
and get sort of an idea of things. But I find
that really the best way to do it is if you make
a recording and then you also have your friend
who lives not too far away make a recording and
then you compare your graphs. Because that lets
you make sure that when you see the graph zig
or zag, if it goes the same direction as your
friend's graph does, then you can make a reasonable
assumption that that was something that was geophysical
in nature and not just your dishwasher turning
on and off. And it can really give you kind of
a sense of what is going on in the geospace environment
at your QTH. That's something that's very remarkable
about it. Another thing about it is that You
can see when you look at these that you'll have
a very clear snapshot that looks one way in California
and you'll have a very clear snapshot that looks
completely different, you know, in the area around
Cleveland, Ohio. on a given day. So we have a
lot of people who are doing prototype stations
of the low -cost personal space weather station,
which is the version I'm working on in my PhD
work, which looks only at these Doppler shifts
and signals from time standard stations, essentially
taking that infrastructure and using them as
passive radar beacons. And, uh, so we have these
collections of plots that we get every day and
we go and compare them. And, you know, there's,
uh, whenever we have a CME, it's always fun to
watch everybody say, Oh, look, mine did this
or mine did that. And you start to get some very
interesting, uh, some interesting jumps, especially
as you accumulate data over time. Oh, very good.
Uh, we're going to talk a little bit more about
that and the personal weather station after the
break, but, uh, before we take our break. Nathaniel,
talk a little bit about Christina's role in this
and kind of starting to branch out to where you're
not the only one heading up these projects. Oh,
well, it's fantastic. Christina's just an excellent,
excellent leader. Oh, thank you. Well, you're
welcome. But yeah, I mean, Case Western has really,
they're the ones that came up with the idea for
the Grape Low Cost Personal Space Weather Station.
And they've really taken the reins on this. And
every Thursday morning at 10 a .m. Eastern, we
get on Zoom and Christina runs the group meeting.
And she just does a wonderful job, you know,
keeping everything in line, keeping track of
everything, interacting with the general public,
keeping track of the different things that need
to be done for the Grape with the Case Western
team. You know, she is advising the undergraduate
students. So it's just great working with her.
And I'm so glad that she's on the project and
doing all of this. So it's really wonderful for
HamSci to have her participate and lead. And
it's just really great. The challenge of this,
you know, is you've got the groundbreaking stuff
done. Now it's time to spread it out and let
it start growing exponentially. And this is a
great move for that. Oh my gosh. Yes. And so,
I mean, that is one of the things, you know,
when HamSci first started, we had you know, one
project and essentially we were very focused
on it. And, you know, now that we have a number
of funded projects and, you know, we're always
encouraging people to participate in different
ways. And we like to see people bring up their
own ideas. So you start seeing these side projects
take off and you kind of can identify some natural
leaders of different projects. And so we're growing
organically. So Christine is certainly one of
those natural leaders. She's doing this. She
also has another project where we're actually
putting some signals onto the WWV transmissions.
We're doing some test signals with that. That's
coming up. So you really need people like Christina
to help lead and guide these different projects.
Now that's that's really cool and great to see
that that you're already passing on some of the
work and spreading it out and hopefully get it
to where it's a perpetual thing so that's that's
great and We can tune in to WWV all time all
the time. So there we go Alright, we're going
to take a break when we come back. We'll open
up the phone lines and check the tweets and probably
talk a little bit more about this personal weather
station thing going on. So we'll do that right
after this word from Icom America right here.
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Well before we open up the phone lines at 859
-982 -7373 and check the tweets and talk some
more with Christina and Nathaniel, we have once
again the Ham Radio Joke of the Week. Now it's
time for the Ham Talk Live Ham Radio Joke of
the Week, the part of the show where Rick tells
us a ham radio joke. The Ham Talk Live Ham Radio
Joke of the Week is brought to you by QRM Labs.
Now here's Rick Garrett in 9GSU with today's
Ham Talk Live Joke of the Week. I started a band
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Talk Live Ham Radio Joke of the Week with Rick
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version You won't be able to reach us live since
we're doing this on Thursday evening. So Let's
let's Kind of jump back in here and we'll see
if we have any questions from anybody tonight
Nathaniel talk a little bit about this this personal
space weather station that that's been put together
and and and how that's being deployed Sure Thanks
Neil. So as Christina said before the personal
space weather station is the flagship project
of the hamsai community right now and essentially
The goal of it is to design some sort of device
that you could operate in your own backyard that
helps you to measure space weather. And what
does that mean? Well, it means a number of different
things. We're interested in anything that can
affect radio propagation or that could sense
currents in space or changes in the ionosphere.
So the personal space weather station, the original
design, we have three major components. We have
a radio component. We have a ground magnetometer
component and there's also a GPS component. So
the radio component, what that does, if you have
the great low cost personal space weather station,
the goal of that is to listen to WWV and look
for these changes in received frequency, the
Doppler shift. And that is caused by changes
in the ionosphere. And we can take that information
and we can back out information about how the
ionosphere is changing. So that's one component.
The second component is the ground magnetometer
and that particular system is used to measure
changes in the Earth's magnetic field. And these
changes are very small changes are actually due
to currents flowing overhead either in the ionosphere
or in space. So if there's a geomagnetic storm
or a big auroral event, you should be able to
sense those changes with the ground magnetometer.
The GPS system has a couple of different purposes.
One purpose is to provide a very stable frequency
and time references to the radio device and also
to the magnetometer. And also, with certain GPS
receivers, you can actually measure the total
number of electrons between the GPS receiver
on the ground and the satellite in space. We
do have one other version of the personal space
weather station that is still very much under
development, and that's this Tangerine software
-defined radio. So we're still working on developing
that right now. It's not quite ready, but the
great, low -cost personal space weather station
version one, you have a number of people deploying
that and using it already. The ground magnetometer,
a number of people are using that already. And
so those are Those are out and are being used.
Well, Christina, we kind of shifted gears there
a little bit. You were making some connections
to this weather station that Nathaniel just explained
to us. So if you can kind of pick up where we
kind of left that and make the connections here
between the eclipse measurements and this personal
weather station. Yeah, absolutely. So what the
the grape is we call it and the reason we call
it the grape is because the main PSWS is called
the tangerine. It's being developed by the Tucson
amateur packet radio network Tapper crowd. And
they have a very active development list and
all of this is on, I think it's hamsi .org slash
PSWS. We call the grape The Grape, which was
a moniker that was coined by AC8YV because it's
a, first of all, it's a tiny piece of electronics
and people always name tiny pieces of electronics
after tiny pieces of fruit. So you've got, you
know, your raspberry pie, your kiwi SDR, your
lime SDR, et cetera, and grape wasn't taken yet.
But the other thing that we like to say is that
it does its best work in bunches. And I mentioned
earlier that the best way to do the deployments
of these is to have one at your house and then
one at your friend's house that's down the block
or five miles away. And there are various lessons
that we've been incorporating into the development
that we've learned through doing pilot experiments.
Because one of the nice things about putting
a pilot experiment together for a short term
recording what you call a campaign in is that
it has sort of the same kinds of aspects as a
ham radio contest. It's something that you do
for a certain period of time. And then it's over,
you know, and you can try different things and
you can set it up to sort of encourage the, the
things that you want to see happen. So in the
same way that, you know, you structure A contest,
you know, field day, you get points for owning
a fire extinguisher, for example. I'm pretty
sure it's the only contest that does that. School
club roundup is my favorite example, how the
way that the point structure is set up makes
it so that you want to talk to schools. But you
can do very similar things where you can leverage
this towards data collection in science campaigns.
And so when we do this for the eclipses, there
have been sort of different kind of scientific
themes or different data collection themes. I
started doing this in, this was for June of last
year, and it was a very, you know, sort of let's
put something together and see what happens kind
of experiment, because there was an annular solar
eclipse across China. And so I put together a
webpage and duplicated the same protocol that
we did for the original festival of frequency
measurement and said, okay, let's use this same
protocol, but we'll try tuning to BPM instead
of WWV. And interesting things sort of began
to come out of the woodwork. For one thing, someone
came in and translated the instructions into
Dutch. So then I had a whole bunch of ham radio
operators in the Netherlands who were collecting
Doppler data all of a sudden. And where you get
these little pockets of participation are always
interesting and really impossible to predict
because I was showing the map to a friend last
night and she was like, why do you have so many
people in Greece? And I think it was because
somebody brought it to their club and showed
it around. But I wound up with a huge amount
of European participation We actually got there
were participants on six continents for that
event and also for the the one in December that
followed it for the eclipse across South America
and So for the the June 2020 event One of the
things that the European stations noticed was
that just using FL digi's frequency estimation
mode you would end up with really noisy data
because there was a station in Italy that I hadn't
known about. So there were actually two different
stations that were just off frequency from each
other. And the algorithm that was looking for
the carrier would bounce between them. So this
was how we started with audio recording. And
the entire community of people that were volunteering
for this experiment, you know, we did one test
round, figured out this was happening about a
week before the actual event. And then I asked
them to record audio and everyone just, you know,
pivoted and about half of the group did that.
And so I had, I think, maybe 50 stations from
that experiment. I know for December there were
about 83 stations that recorded audio of various
stations for June of this year, where there was
a partial eclipse that went sort of, it had a
very strange path of totality. You can see this
in the maps online. It went over the Arctic.
And I'm curious to see what people will figure
out about the overlap between that and, you know,
auroral precipitation in that region. For that
one, we had people try different, you know, time
standard stations according to their preference.
And, you know, I suggested, well, you might want
to try RWM, but really try whatever station you
want. And so seeing, you know, what people chose
to record, what people found at their various
areas, just kind of playing with it, you pick
up these different insights about where stations
are that you can use as beacons, what you can
do with them. And then also, you know, how far
apart should these stations be to be able to
sort of distribute them around? When you do this
as a campaign, you're doing everything that you
would do with setting up a network, but you get
to sort of see some of the end results. in kind
of preview mode. You skip over several of the
really hard decisions that you would be making
if you were trying to set up a scientific, you
know, remote sensing network from scratch. Like,
you don't know where you would put the stations,
so you just see what happens. You know, you don't
know what particular set of data you necessarily
even want to collect, so you just try to get
whatever you can. And there were many interesting
elements of looking at you know, the participation
maps all by themselves and sort of the social
aspect of it and the international collaboration,
which of course is one of the core principles
of ham radio, the way in which the community
steps up. And then also just looking at what
happens in the plots, the different types of
noise and things that you see. Now when we move
to doing this with the grape network, we will
be able to have a certain level of known good
stations will know, for instance, that if somebody
is running a grape station, that they have the
same signal chain as somebody else who's running
a different grape station. And that this will
be set up in such a way that probably they will
have, you know, done it maybe in a cluster with
some other people, as I've been talking about,
and you'll be able to reference them off of each
other. So the The real, you know, my favorite
thing I think of all of the communications that
I've had with volunteers was I got this wonderful
email from one of the radio operators in the
Netherlands where he sent me this graph that
he had made with, you know, two or three of his
friends where they had lined their charts up.
And he said, you know, I don't know what we're
seeing here. I don't know if this is the ionosphere
or if it's local noise. But we're having a lot
of fun. And that was really kind of the whole
point of doing the pilot experiments was that
it was a way for people to to come together and
try this out and sort of get a better understanding
of your own environment and tie it into what
other people are doing. So really, the eclipse
is just an excuse to do that in the same way
that a contest is just an excuse to operate.
Well, it's some fascinating stuff, Christina
and Thank you so much for taking this one on
and Nathaniel for the overarching scientific
tie -in to amateur radio. It's one that's near
and dear to my heart being a science educator
and just really impressed with what you've been
able to do. So thank you so much for coming on
and telling us about it. Thanks for all the work
and good luck on the Eclipse next month and Nathaniel,
remind everybody where they can sign up and do
this stuff. Sure, so for the Eclipse specifically,
you can go to hamside .org slash festivals or
you can go to hamside .org, you click projects
and then you see Eclipse and frequency measurement
festivals and you can pick the December 2021
Eclipse measurement festival. All the way at
the bottom, there's a link for the Google group
there. There's also a main Google group. You
just go to hamside .org, click get involved,
and all the information is right there. All right,
very good. Christina, any final comments? Other
than HamSci .org slash festivals, none in particular,
but I hope that we get some good participation
this year. And I will say one thing for, cause
this is a question I get a lot. Folks often ask,
is it still worthwhile for me to collect data,
even if I'm far from the path of totality? And
of course, for this particular experiment, everyone's
far from the path of totality, really. And the
answer is yes, because what we're looking for
with the Grape Network are wave -like structures
that propagate through the ionosphere. We're
looking for traveling ionospheric disturbances,
and those can go for hundreds of kilometers.
They can travel a very great distance. So even
if, you know, you're looking at things that are
away from the sort of perturbing force, we may
still be able to observe some quite interesting
things together. Sounds great. Nathaniel, any
final comments? We look forward to everyone participating
and it's been a real pleasure being on your show.
All right. We'll look forward to seeing you again
soon and look forward to hearing about how this
next big project goes. So thanks for being here.
And we're going to talk a little bit about a
couple of giveaways here before we go. First
of all, Christian K0STH over at 100WattsInAWire
is giving away $1 ,000 on his show. You can go
over to 100WattsInAWire .com and read the rules
there, but basically you go on and make a wish
list and then... You get all the stuff if you
win. So make sure you check that out. 100wattsandawire
.com. Also here at HamTalk Live, we have a giveaway
for the month of November. One of my friends
and listeners of the show, Tanner Jones, W9TWJ,
is giving away two free remote license testing
opportunities. So you can take your test by remote,
Zoom usually, and we're gonna give away one for
a listener of HamTalk Live that hasn't been licensed
yet, so you're brand new to Ham and Radio. We
want to give you a chance to win a free license
test and it's a remote one so you can do it from
anywhere. And then we're also going to give away
one for someone who wants to upgrade. So if you're
already a licensed amateur, there's a separate
giveaway for that one. So here's how you enter.
You go to win win .hamtalklive .com And that
will give you all the details and then you can
click and fill out the form there For a chance
to win. We're going to cut that off at on November
30th so you have until the end of the month to
sign up and We'll give these two remote testing
sessions Tanner's going to pay the fees for those,
so we're going to give those away to one random
entry from those forms. So again, it's win .hamtalklive
.com to enter. Well, that is a wrap for this
week's edition of HamTalk Live. Thanks to my
guests, Christina Collins, KD8OXT, and Dr. Nathaniel
Frisell, W2NAF, and everybody out there in cyberspace
for listening and calling in, and invite you
back next Thursday night, 9 p .m. Eastern Time,
right here at HamTalkLive. And if you'd like
to see who's coming up on the show next, you
can also find that at HamTalkLive .com. So for
now, this is Neil Rapp, WB9VPG, saying seven
three, seven five, and may the good DX be yours.