W2NAF and KM4EGE Win Yasme Foundation Excellence Award

The Yasme Foundation announced this past week that Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF and Magda Moses, KM4EGE are winners of the 2017 Excellence Award for their role in starting HamSCI and organizing and promoting the Solar Eclipse QSO Party. From Yasme's Website, "The Yasme Excellence Awards are presented to individuals who through their own service, creativity, effort and dedication have made a significant contribution to amateur radio. The contribution may be in recognition of technical, operating or organizational achievement as all three are necessary for amateur radio to grow and prosper. These awards shall be given from time to time as the board feels appropriate."

HamSCI began in 2015 when Nathaniel saw Magda's undergraduate research poster on preparing to study ionospheric effects due to the (then upcoming) August 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. Prior to that, Nathaniel had published work showing that observations from the Reverse Beacon Network could be used to to sense ionospheric changes due to Solar Flare effects. By working with people at Virginia Tech, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the American Radio Relay League, the Reverse Beacon Network, and the ham radio community, the Solar Eclipse QSO Party became what is recognized by Yasme as the "the largest amateur radio experiment ever devised and generated the world’s most extensive set of HF propagation observations during an eclipse."

The SEQP generated over 30,000 QSOs, 618,000 RBN spots, 630,000 WSPR spots, and 1,237,000 PSKReporter spots. In total, over 2.5 million spots were recorded for the 8 hour duration of the SEQP. In addition, amateurs submitted terabytes worth of IQ-spectrum recordings and high-resolution HF frequency measurements to the HamSCI Zenodo Community Repository. Science teams at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, and in the amateur radio community are now working on analyzing these observations. Initial results were presented at the Tuscan Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) Digital Communications Conference and the HamSCI-UK Workshops. Presentations are also planned for the upcoming American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society meetings.

Amateurs who wish to learn more and/or present their findings are invited to do so at the upcoming HamSCI Workshop hosted by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) from February 23 - 24, 2018. HamSCI is led from the New Jersey Institute of Technology by Nathaniel Frissell, who complete his Ph.D. in 2016 at Virginia Tech and is now a research professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research.