e-POP

In the spirit of making data from the Radio Receiver Instrument (RRI) onboard Swarm-E (formally known as e-POP) more accessible to the ham radio community, we have converted RRI's data into a ".raw" format so that it can be ingested into open source software such as Gqrx or GNU Radio.  We have done this for all RRI data related to the 2015, 2017, and 2018 ARRL Field Days. We encourage everyone to help us identify hams in RRI's signal.  You can use the Gqrx tool discussed here, or you can use your own technique.  If you decode a ham's call sign, if you would like to share your technique, or if you have any comments or suggestion contact us and let us know!  To help organize your findings, you can download a spreadhseet containing that you can fill out and send to us.  Feel free to create your own spreadsheet or modify this one.

By G. W. Perry, N. A. Frissell, E. S. Miller, and J. D. Katz

The Enhanced Polar Outflow Probe (e-POP) onboard the Canadian CAScade Smallsat and Ionospheric Polar Explorer (CASSIOPE) satellite will once again be supporting ham radio citizen science by participating in the 2017 American Radio Relay League Field Day, on June 24 and 25, 2017. On an annual basis, the ham radio community participates in the ARRL Field Day to exercise and hone their skills in the field.  In essence, it is an emergency preparedness exercise – one of the largest anywhere – with several thousand hams taking part across the world.  From a radio science perspective, Field Day is an ideal time for e-POP to study the structure of the Earth’s ionosphere using Field Day participants’ transmissions.