The 40th annual ARRL and TAPR Digital Communications Conference (DCC) will take place September 17–18, 2021. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s conference will be held online. Registered DCC attendees participating via Zoom will be able to interact with presenters and other attendees via a chat room as well as raise a virtual hand to ask questions. Click here to register (you don’t need a Zoom account to register). Non-registered DCC attendees can watch the live stream for free on YouTube and can chat and ask questions via the moderator monitoring the channel. No registration is required for YouTube access (the YouTube URL will be announced and posted on this webpage preceding the DCC). DCC registration is free for TAPR members and $30 for non-members. Members receive a 100% discount at checkout. Click here to register. Non-members who would like to join TAPR and receive the free DCC pass can simply add TAPR membership and DCC registration to their shopping carts. After checkout, they will receive the free DCC pass when their membership is processed.
Call for Papers and Speakers: Technical papers are being solicited for presentation. Papers will also be published in the Conference Proceedings. Authors do not need to participate in the conference to have their papers included in the Proceedings. The submission deadline is August 15, 2020. Submit papers via email to Maty Weinberg, KB1EIB, maty@arrl.org. Papers will be published exactly as submitted, and authors will retain all rights.
Registration is now open for the 2021 HamSCI workshop. A full schedule of speakers and registration information can be found on the HamSCI Workshop 2021 website. The workshop will be held in a virtual format on Friday and Saturday, March 19-20. The University of Scranton will serve as host for the Zoom webinar, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), that will include addresses by guest speakers, poster presentations and demonstrations of relevant instrumentation and software. The theme of this year’s workshop is midlatitude ionospheric science. The workshop will also serve as a team meeting for the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station project, which is a NSF funded project awarded to University of Scranton physics and electrical engineering professor Nathaniel Frissell, Ph.D. The project seeks to harness the power of a network of licensed amateur radio operators to better understand and measure the effects of weather in the upper levels of Earth’s atmosphere.
The annual HamSCI Workshop will be held virtually this year March 19-20, 2021 using Zoom hosted by The University of Scranton and sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The primary objective of the HamSCI workshop is to bring together the amateur radio community and professional scientists. The theme of the 2021 HamSCI Workshop is midlatitude ionospheric science. We welcome submissions related to development of the Personal Space Weather Station, ionospheric science, atmospheric science, radio science, space weather, radio astronomy, and any science topic that can be appropriately related to the amateur radio hobby. We especially encourage subimissions related to this year's meeting theme of midlatitude ionospheric physics, but will also accept abstracts outside of this theme and otherwise appropriate. To submit an abstract, please fill out the on the HamSCI Workshop 2021 page at http://hamsci.org/hamsci2021.
Save the dates! The next HamSCI workshop will be held virtually March 19-20, 2021. The HamSCI workshop is an annual meeting to share scientific and engineering ideas and results related to amateur radio, radio propagation, and radio science, as well as foster collaborations between the amateur radio and professional space science and space weather communities. The 2021 workshop will serve as both a team meeting for the Personal Space Weather Station project, as well as a forum for presentations on topics relevant to the HamSCI mission. The format will be similar to virtual March 2020 HamSCI workshop. Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation and The University of Scranton, the cost of this workshop is free. Abstract will be due February 15th. Information regarding abstract submission and other workshop details will be forthcoming. Please join the HamSCI Google Group to stay up-to-date on the latest information.
"The question was asked: why do we see sporadic-E like propagation in November and December, when many of the variables like UV radiation and solar exposure are at a minimum, unlike the very active sporadic-E summer months? Much like it was shown that North Atlantic transatlantic 6m propagation during the summer was made more possible by strategically placed weather storm systems, it looks like a similar effect with very strong jet stream boundaries also affect sporadic-e like communications during the winter months. This citizen science study is another example how amateur radio can contribute to science, and illustrates the great potentials for studies using ham radio data. We have many amateur radio stations on the air, using modes like FT8 which make contacts on propagation paths that we thought were previously impossible."
The procedure page is up for December 2020 Eclipse Festival of Frequency Measurement is up! There will be 24-hour practice run on December 5. The main data recording will run from December 9-16.
The ARRL Frequency Measurement Test (FMT) is a bi-annual event that has its roots back to 1931! Back then, it was needed to ensure that Official Observers (OOs) could correctly callibrate their radios for monitoring and policing purposes. The FMT is still quite relevant today, but for different reasons. Today, the most significant source of error on a stable recieved signal will be due to ionospheric variability. Therefore, making frequency measurements is of great interest to the HamSCI community. These types of measurements are some of the inspiration for the HamSCI Festival of Frequency campaigns and the Low-Cost Personal Space Weather Station. The FMT is a great way to get started in learning how to take precision ionsopheric measurements. A new Frequency Measurement Test mode added to the free FLDigi program makes it even easier to participate. You can now download an article entitled "Using Fldigi for the ARRL Frequency Measuring Test (FMT)" by Bob Howard, VE3YX, to help get you started. The next FMT will be November 13, 2020 from 0200Z-0524Z. . Practice FMT sessions are being conducted by the fmt-nuts group as posted on their home page at https://groups.io/g/fmt-nuts. . Practice FMT sessions are being conducted by the fmt-nuts group as posted on their home page at https://groups.io/g/fmt-nuts. More details are available at https://fmt.arrl.org/ and in the November 2020 QST article by Ward Silver, N0AX. Thank you to FLDigi author Dave Freese W1HJK for his hard work in developing FLDigi and this new mode!
Ash Chaabane, 3V/KF5EYY, reports that a new Reverse Beacon Network (reversebeacon.net) node has been successfully installed in Tunisia. There will soon be an Algerian and Libyan node when logistics permit. The Tunisian node consists of a DX Engineering ARAV4-1P active vertical antenna (see the photo, contributed by Ash), a Red Pitaya 122-16 SDR, and CW Skimmer software by VE3NEA. You can see the stations reported on several bands by the new node at https://dxcluster.ha8tks.hu/azimuthal_map/index.php?c=3V/KF5EYY&t=de. This node was part of a Yasme Foundation (yasme.org) project to install more RBN nodes in out-of-the-way places not currently home to a receiver. The project aims to support both the amateur radio community and spaceweather/geophysics research community with propagation information from around the world and raise awareness of amateur radio's long-standing history of supporting science. Additional nodes are planned for the Caribbean, South Pacific, and Russia, while other groups are installing nodes in Australia.
