Ham’s Efforts Help Shed Light on Solar Eclipse
/The recent solar eclipse over North America gave hams a chance to give back to science in a big way - as big as the sun itself, you might say.
The day after the 8th April 2024 solar eclipse, logs were already rolling in from hams and radio clubs in North America who had taken part in the Solar Eclipse QSO Party. The party's organizer, the citizen science group HamSCI, was already embarking on its next big challenge: to study the logs and the results of other propagation experiments that were taking place concurrently.
“We are certainly very very happy with yesterday. A lot of people were on the air who understood that from the standpoint of science you have to populate to propagate.”
That population included the Suffolk County Radio Club, W2DQ, which set up a Field Day-style operation outside an eastern Long Island library where it operated SSB and FT8. It was also a chance to educate visitors as club vice president Ed Wilson N2XDD explained the hams' roles in the ionospheric studies.
Meanwhile, HamSCI reported that WSPR data was already coming in from a concurrent event, the Gladstone Signal Spotting Challenge. He said valuable results were collected as well from HamSCI's personal weather stations, the time-delay-of-arrival experiment and the medium-wave recordings experiment.
Conclusions are, of course, a long way off -- but visitors to Hamvention in Ohio next month will be hearing more of what's to come.
