Ham Radio Forms a Planet-Sized Space Weather Sensor Network | Hacker News Reader

Ham Radio Forms a Planet-Sized Space Weather Sensor Network

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179 pointssohkamyung31 comments

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

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.

What's very interesting is the licensing requirements for Ham Radio, while being dumb, are very good entry points. [1] and [2] essentially give you flash cards and tell you when you have enough of the questions memorized to pass the exam. Once you do that you can use [3] to find an exam session. These are usually hosted by radio clubs so you can immediately find a club of people who like radio and live by you. If you live in Tucson, Arizona or Dayton, Ohio you're in a lot of luck since they are the biggest clubs I know of.

There's mainly a few "areas" people like:

- Digital (PSK, etc)

- CW (Morse Code usually over long distances)

- Repeaters (VHF, a small local community, essentially TeamSpeak)

If I had enough money I'd buy a FT-100D [4] since it lets you do "everything" (poorly) in a single package which is important for me since I live in a small apartment.

When you get your license, go to your local radio club, tell people you're new, and ask them to participate in something called "Field Day". It's a disaster preparedness "drill" done yearly and works like a contest: talk to a bunch of people regardless of method and get points for it. You'll see everyone doing everything. There's people doing QRP (very low power transmissions usually off batter/solar) and QRO (people using very high power radios). Digital/analog, etc.

[1] - qrz.com

[2] - www.hamradiolicenseexam.com

[3] - www.arrl.org/find-an-amateur-radio-license-exam-session

[4] - https://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/hamhf/3473.html

http://HamStudy.org is a free (and ad free) site that lets you study the amateur radio question pools.

The developer also built ExamTools which many groups use to administer remote license exams. You can find sessions here: http://hamstudy.org/sessions

If you want something self hosted I also wrote this: https://github.com/gravypod/ButcherSchool

The scripts there should still work for the exams.

This is only for US. Are there any for EU or other countries?

Each country's member association of the International Amateur Radio Union[0] likely provides information on ways to get your ham radio license in the specific country.

Germany: https://www.darc.de/einsteiger/amateurfunkausbildung/

UK: https://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur-radio/

France: https://promocom.r-e-f.org/

Sweden: https://www.ssa.se/amatorradio/bli-radioamator/

[0]: https://www.iaru.org/reference/member-societies/

go wild using SDRs and just start researching what everything does. the kiwisdr network is really impressive and amazing - http://ve3sun.com/KiwiSDR/

if you live in the US, i've found that 90% of ham action is bordering on c-span call-in line territory and really off-putting and demoralizing.

it's much more exciting and encouraging at first to listen in faraway locales online (and then you can eventually get some equipment that can catch those signals physically at your house too). the old tech guy factor is alive and well with the subculture which is honestly really endearing imo, especially the people that review equipment on youtube. it is a level of humble and noble pedantry - what some might call dorkiness - that seems like it barely even exists in my generation's youtube

There are workarounds for the annoying ranting if you can keep a basic plan, log, and schedule. Find nets, special event stations, and contests that interest you, on your favorite band or mode or both. Or multiples of each. You will never run out of interesting stuff.

(The same is kinda true with anything you can mindlessly browse, be it OTA TV or even Twitter or YouTube. Once you put a framework into motion it's easier to cut out stuff you don't like, by finding things you do like)

> ...bordering on c-span call-in line territory and really off-putting and demoralizing.

Is this a roundabout way of complaining that you can't block or flag people you disagree with in meatspace?

I don't want to put words in the above poster's mouth, but I think they're just saying that it isn't fun to listen to incoherent rambling and the occasional racist rant. Based off of a few hours listening to the infamous .435 in Los Angeles [1], I'm inclined to agree

[1]: https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/14747

I guess c-span got a lot more interesting since I stopped watching tv, not only allowing racist rants on air - but doing it to a degree that develops a level notoriety supporting cultural shorthand. Like Emily Post. Either that or... nah, I don't wanna put words in your mouth.

Yeah, I think things escalated around ~2010. It's definitely not an everyday thing, but I think every year or two someone manages to scream the N word on Washington Journal. Around 2012 they added a short delay to calls and every once in a while they make the delay even longer. There was also a period around the 2012 election when people kept calling in and asking about the size of Mitt Romney's penis.

Sounds like classic trolling fare, as in: Mitt Romney's penis is only discussed in places where mention of his penis is frowned on. Given how many Americans think "hate speech" is a legally defined thing, I'd expect offensive language in any environment where there is a chance to remotely provoke a reaction. That is, unless Romney's penis is commonly discussed on amateur radio - in that case there is something much more interesting happening.

Nah. They only listen to voice contacts, and haven’t bothered to listen to Morse code or any of the digital modes. FT8 is guaranteed to be rant-free.

/r/amateurradio isn't bad. Alternately find a sub-niche that uses radios for something, and dig in from there (SOTA if you like hiking, wspr stuff if low power digital is interesting, etc)

I like the videos by David Casler on YouTube. He has many. The videos for the Technician class license may be of interest to you.

You might also want to check out the American Radio Relay League, at arrl.org.

Wishing you success with your investigation.

It occurred to me that you might enjoy listening to amateur radio over the web while you are thinking about your next move:

websdr.org

websdr is a gateway drug. It's still an amazing resource but I just want to also give props to kiwisdr just because of one amazing feature: TDOA localization.

go here - http://rx.linkfanel.net/

pick a radio and tune to a station

click the 'extensions' dropdown at the bottom right and select 'TDoA'

give the extension a bit to load at the bottom left

pick a set of radios from the map (blue boxes) that are close enough to likely hear the station you're tuned to until you get 4-5 radios filled in the form on the bottom left.

click 'Submit'

if you get any red 'X' indicators click the scissors and try again. you should see a little circle clock while it collects samples, then the extension will attempt to plot likely locations for the transmitter.

really cool i think

(just tried it on a shortwave station transmitting out of Okeechobee, FL and got this result https://i.imgur.com/k2brLAk.png)

I know nothing. I went to several sites and the display looks functional, but all I am hearing is white noise. Is there a tutorial somewhere? It has sounded cool for years, but I need to bootstrap somehow.

I am so old school that 95% of my listening is college radio stations (WREK, KFJC, WKCR...) and noncommercial stations KSDS, WFMU, WWOZ, ...). I would love to branch out.

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

Follow up: that's a really neat paper! The wind results are super interesting. I just wish the paper explored the lag more readily, and more importantly talked about the physics at play there. The description "a wind filtering mechanism may be responsible for the strong correlation, but the exact nature of this mechanism is beyond the scope of this paper" is at the end and it just leaves so much more to be explored! Do the authors really believe it's the wind that's responsible? Would it not be more likely wind-associated properties such as moisture transport? It would make sense for there to be a hysteresis tied to water vapor concentration (LWP/PWV) tied to large scale shifts in circulation.

You should also check out his PhD thesis from VT.

I passed this along to Philip of pskreporter.info as he'll certainly find it fascinating as well!

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

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

See also various beacons spread around the globe so people can measure propagation:

* https://www.ncdxf.org/beacon/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Beacon_Project

The one in Eureka, Nunavut is quite the location.

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.

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.

Interesting, my local repeaters were full of liberal activists

I find that implausible having been on many repeaters in many regions of the United States in blue, red, and purple states.

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