The HamSCI team completed a successful weekend presenting at the 2017 Dayton Hamvention in Xenia, Ohio. From May 19-21, the HamSCI team ran a booth in the ARRL Expo area where they discussed the HamSCI mission, upcoming experiments, and ways ham radio operators could participate in HamSCI activities. The HamSCI team included members from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, the MIT Haystack Observatory, and Citizen Scientists from the general amateur radio community. This includes the upcoming Solar Eclipse QSO Party (SEQP), participation in the EclipseMob Project, and a live demonstration of both Red Pitaya and Rabbit S-9C based Reverse Beacon Network receive nodes. On Saturday morning, HamSCI presented an ARRL-sponsored forum where members gave oral presentations about HamSCI research and activities. Photos, videos of the presentations, and PDFs of presentation slides are included in this post.
In “The Reverse Beacon Network” (Oct. 2016 QST, pp. 30-32), Pete Smith, N4ZR, and Ward Silver, N0AX explain how the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN) is used to observe and report both CW and RTTY communications to the DX spotting network and to a data archive. This article explains how to be spotted by the RBN, how to download RBN data, and also how to become an RBN receiving node.
In “The New Sunspot Numbers” (Oct. 2016 QST, pp. 38-41), Carl Luetzelschwab, K9LA, reviews the history of sunspot numbers and how they are calculated, as well as explains a new formulation of sunspot numbers in use by the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Sunspot numbers are important because they are correlated with the atmospheric ionization on Earth.
