In this episode, I joined Colin Butler, M6BOY; Edmund Spicer, M0MNG; Ed Durrant DD5LP; and Leslie Butterfield, G0CIB to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. The news items included:
The episode’s feature was on Hamzilla 2022.
Australia
Amateur radio in the news: Hams tune into ionospheric waves, Australian radio hams help out after floods
Ham Radio Operators Tune In to Giant Waves in the Earth’s Ionosphere
The very upper layer of our atmosphere is electrically charged and sometimes the electrons up there clump up and form giant waves larger than Texas that zip around the Earth faster than a jet plane! A team of researchers from NASA’s Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) has observed these giant waves, called Large-Scale Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances, or LSTIDs, for the first time. Volunteers from the amateur radio community collected the data.
The distance that amateur radio operators can communicate
with each other changes over time, tracing a wave-like
pattern (red dots). Credit: Frissell et al. 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2022GL097879
This new technique for observing these LSTIDs and vividly demonstrates their effect on radio communications. It can help us understand where these waves come from, and how the layers of our atmosphere interact. These results were published in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters. If you love amateur radio and like to get involved with the HamSci citizen science project, visit https://hamsci.org/.
Gorham residents among those reaching out to Ukrainians
Support from all over Maine is being sent to Ukraine as residents of the Pine Tree State pitch in with donation drives, benefit dinners and concerts to help the victims of the Russian invasion of its Eastern European neighbor.
One Gorham resident has lent moral support through direct contact with a Ukrainian man. Ham radio buff Bob Parsons got through this week to Volody Leshkulich, who was somewhere in the area of Kyiv, the capital city under attack by Russian forces. Leshkulich speaks English.
“They are hanging in there. That’s just about all he said. He wasn’t going to elaborate,” said Parsons, who broadcasts from his home via an antenna on a 55-foot tower using the call letters KA1KSQ.
Australian radio hams help out after floods
When natural disasters hit, amateur radio operators can be the first to transmit calls for help to the rest of the world. But in recent weeks, radio amateurs in flood-affected areas have watched helplessly as all their vital gear has been washed away.
However, a club on the New South Wales-Victoria border has stepped up to help. “We saw a need,” North East Victoria Amateur Radio Club (NEVARC) secretary Frank Scott VK2BFC said.
“So we’ve created a fund to try and assist these operators who may have lost all their equipment and in some way try and replace it.”