 | This Friday, 2/15 we are holding our February General meeting (everyone is welcome). Our invited speaker is Marcel Stieber, AI6MS. Marcel will walk us through the system design for off-grid solar-powered radio sites including power budgets, equipment selection, and maintenance. He will use a case study to explore specific design details and decisions to help us deploy our first fully-off-grid solar-powered radio site! Marcel is an electrical engineer currently working at Amazon as a hardware systems integration lead. |
 Back in the news this month; We generally assume some things about the Earth will always be the same. In the paper, published in January 2018, the researchers presented evidence gathered from southern Africa that could help us get a better idea of what the heck is going on the South Atlantic Anomaly, which spans from Chile to Zimbabwe. The fact is that Earth’s magnetic field reverses polarity relatively often — on average, every couple million years. The good news is that In a paper published five months later, an international team of researchers provides evidence that the current disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field does not indicate that it’s about to reverse polarity, contrary to what some experts have recently suggested. What would happen if Earth's polarity reverses? Here is a great article by the National Geographic on the topic. This is a super fascinating topic. If such an event could happen in our lifetime what would you think the consequences on HF propagation would be? Would love to hear your thoughts on our mailing group
 On Feb 8th, ARISS run another one of their popular Slow Scan Television (SSTV) experiment events. Transmissions began on Friday, Feb. 8 at 18:25 UTC and run through Sunday, Feb. 10 at 18:30 UTC. SSTV operation is a process by which images are sent from the International Space Station (ISS) via ham radio and received by ham operators, shortwave listeners and other radio enthusiasts on Earth.
When an event becomes active, SSTV images are transmitted from the ISS at the frequency of 145.80 MHz using the SSTV mode of PD120 and can be received using ham radio equipment as simple as a 2 meter handheld radio or a common shortwave or scanner receiver that covers the 2 meter ham band. After connecting the audio output of the radio receiver to the audio input of a computer running free software such as MMSSTV, the SSTV images can be displayed. In this transmission hams received eight NASA On The Air (NOTA) pictures and 4 ARISS commemorative ones. Did you get any? |
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