The Global Disaster Alert Coordination System (GDACS) has issued a report this week, saying that extreme weather events occur regularly in the Southern Africa and Indian Ocean region. They are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change. El Niño is expected to exacerbate the risk of drought and cyclones. These natural hazards result in economic and political challenges, crop pests and diseases, and conflicts. This undermines living conditions, food security, and the livelihoods of millions of people in the region. Almost 35 million people in the Southern African and Indian Ocean region are expected to experience, or are already experiencing, high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023-2024.  

In 2024, the EU made an initial allocation of EUR 33.5 million to support humanitarian actions. The most vulnerable populations in Mozambique, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe are the main recipients of emergency aid.

EU humanitarian funding in the Southern African and Indian Ocean region provides emergency relief responses such as food assistance, protection services, access to health care, access to drinkable water, sanitation and hygiene, logistics, anticipatory action and disaster preparedness. The EU also supports actions to ensure the continuation of education in humanitarian crises. EU humanitarian funding ensures safe learning spaces and provides adequate education programmes for children in areas affected by violence and displacement.

BBC.com says that amateur radio enthusiasts gathered on Wednesday to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Guglielmo Marconi.

Marconi was the famous inventor and Nobel Prize for Physics winner.

The event took place at the Marconi Museum on the Lizard Peninsula, where Marconi did a lot of his work.

In 1901 he achieved a significant milestone, the first ever transatlantic communication from Poldhu to Newfoundland in Canada.

Poldhu Amateur Radio Station was on air talking all around the world as part of the event.

James Woolford, from Poldhu Amateur Radio Club, said he hoped the event would bring a bit of perspective to the younger generation.

He said: “We’re always trying to bring the message especially to the younger generation about what Marconi has brought to their world.

“He was the first man who was talking about mobile phones in the 1920s and we take a lot of things for granted now which link back to Marconi.

“He was a very important character in history who probably touched the lives of more of us and our technology than anyone else.”

Ian Bradley, ZS1BR has sent us a report on a recent motor rally. He says:

“Amateur radio operators were asked to assist with communications at the Cape Swartland Rally which ran over the course of two days and comprised a total of 14 stages. Twenty-eight cars were registered to take part over the two days, including several national teams as this was the first leg of the 2024 National Rally Championship.

“Day one was split into two halves with the first few stages held in the Malmesbury area, after which we transitioned to Killarney Raceway for some fast-paced night racing. While the day was not marred by any serious incidents, our operators were quick to pick up on any vehicles stuck or broken down in the stages and ensure there were no safety concerns.

“Day two was somewhat more relaxed in comparison to the previous evening and took place on the farms surrounding Riebeek-Kasteel, with Control situated at Du Vlei Farm Stall & Restaurant (which will certainly get another visit when we don’t have a race to focus on!).  The first few stages weren’t incident free, however the operators at the start and end positions made easy work of them. Our only serious accident of the rally took place early on in the afternoon and the ambulance was quickly dispatched from the start of the stage. Both driver and navigator were taken to hospital as a precaution but were thankfully found to have no serious injuries.

“While our primary function at these events is to facilitate communication between the various officials and marshals, and to be on standby for emergency communications, we also assist the scorers by collecting and transmitting the stage times as each team finishes a stage.  This allows both the rally teams and the public to track overall positions in near real-time, as well as to exercise the radio operators’ communications skills and accuracy in data transfer.

“Special thanks to ZS1JM, ZS1ATX, ZR1JL, ZS1JFK, ZS1YT, ZS1WV and ZS1EEE for making it a great outing. We invite any operators, whether you have an interest in motorsport or not, to come and play radio out in the field.”

Thank you, Ian, for the report and for the role you played in the rally.

Phys.org says that a team of physicists and engineers at Vector Atomic, Inc., a maker of navigation and communications equipment, has developed a new kind of atomic clock that they claim is both ultra-precise and sturdy. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes the factors that went into building their new clock and how well it has worked during field tests aboard a ship in the Pacific Ocean.

Bonnie Marlow and Jonathan Hirschauer, both with the MITRE Corporation, have published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue, outlining the need for ultra-precise atomic clocks and the work done by the team at Vector Atomic.

As the tools used on board ships have grown more sophisticated, the technology behind them has become increasingly reliant on precise timing. Navigation uses radio systems, for example, that use GPS. With such systems, very small time inaccuracies when measuring signal propagation between satellites can result in positioning errors of hundreds of meters, which can matter a lot when military vessels are involved.

Ships currently rely on atomic clocks that are robust enough to be able to work while on a rolling vessel, but they are not nearly as accurate as the atomic clocks used in research labs. In this new effort, the team at Vector Atomic has developed a clock to help bridge the difference.

The clock is based on the use of oscillating iodine molecules and weighs just 26 kilograms, which is about the size of three shoeboxes—small enough for use on virtually any ship. The group claims that it is approximately 1,000 times more precise than the types of clocks currently used.

In developing the clock, the team has been working with New Zealand’s navy. They tested the clock aboard the HMNZS Aotearoa as it conducted normal shipping operations for three weeks in the Pacific Ocean. Data from the tests showed that the clock was nearly as accurate as it was when tested in the lab—it kept time to within 300 trillionths of a second over any given day.

The development team notes that they are continuing to work on the clock, hoping to make it small enough to carry aboard navigation satellites.

300 trillionths of a second? That’s probably accurate enough to get my boiled egg just right!

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the “Great Filter.”

The Great Filter is a hypothesized event or situation that prevents intelligent life from becoming interplanetary and interstellar and even leads to its demise. Think climate change, nuclear war, asteroid strikes, supernova explosions, plagues, or any number of other things from the rogue’s gallery of cataclysmic events.

Or how about the rapid development of AI?

A new paper in Acta Astronautica explores the idea that Artificial Intelligence becomes Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) and that ASI is the Great Filter. The paper’s title is “Is Artificial Intelligence the Great Filter that makes advanced technical civilizations rare in the universe?” The author is Michael Garrett from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

Some think the Great Filter prevents technological species like ours from becoming multi-planetary. That’s bad because a species is at greater risk of extinction or stagnation with only one home. According to Garrett, a species is in a race against time without a backup planet. “It is proposed that such a filter emerges before these civilizations can develop a stable, multi-planetary existence, suggesting the typical longevity (L) of a technical civilization is less than 200 years,” Garrett writes.

If true, that can explain why we detect no techno-signatures or other evidence of ETI’s (Extra-terrestrial Intelligences.) What does that tell us about our own technological trajectory? If we face a 200-year constraint, and if it’s because of ASI, where does that leave us? Garrett underscores the “…critical need to quickly establish regulatory frameworks for AI development on Earth and the advancement of a multi-planetary society to mitigate such existential threats.”

Many scientists and other thinkers say we’re on the cusp of enormous transformation. AI is just beginning to transform how we do things; much of the transformation is behind the scenes. AI seems poised to eliminate jobs for millions, and when paired with robotics, the transformation seems almost unlimited. That’s a fairly obvious concern.

It seems to me though, that the very restriction we might face from Artificial Super Intelligence, might also protect us from those three–legged green creatures from “War of the Worlds”!

Huntnewsnu.com tells us this week that the Boston 26.2 mile (42.195km) marathon held on 15^th April attracted about 9000 volunteer helpers, of whom about 300 were radio amateurs.

The volunteers were responsible for maintaining constant radio communications, connecting all points of the course with a main radio hub, Boston Fire, EMS and police.

Radio communications provided important assistance to the other marathon volunteers, said Jonah Lefkoff, a third-year computer engineering and computer science combined major [at Northeastern University] and vice president of NU Wireless. Most of the volunteers in attendance do boots-on-the-ground work, like managing hydration stations or medical tents.

“The value of the marathon, to novice amateur radio operators, is it offers real world experience,” said Maggie Heaney, a third-year electrical engineering and music combined major and director of outreach for NU Wireless. “We treat [the marathon] as a good opportunity for especially younger ham radio operators to get out and use these skills to help the general populace or other outside groups such as the Boston Athletic Association.”

All of the amateur radio operator volunteers from Northeastern University attended a training session in Framingham in February to learn more about the marathon course and their assignments. There are four segments that radio operator volunteers can serve on: start, finish, course and transportation. 

During the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, radio volunteers played a vital role in coordinating and carrying out an emergency response, Lefkoff said. A central component of being an amateur radio operator [volunteer] is being knowledgeable about the safeguards that are in place in case something fails or an emergency occurs. 

I’m sure all HAMNET South Africa members resonate with those opinions.

A quick note about HAMNET Western Cape’s Internet link at our ZS1DCC station at the City of Cape Town’s Disaster Risk Management Centre: I’m pleased to tell you that the fibre link has been restored after several months, and we are now able to offer relays automatically from ZS1DCC, of Cape Town Club bulletins, and HAMNET bulletins on Echolink, via ZS1DCC-R, and also on 80 metres 3770kHz LSB. So if you wondered what happened, wonder no more, the relays are back! Feel free to listen to the Cape Town bulletin on ZS1DCC-R on Sunday mornings at 08h30, and the HAMNET bulletin at 19h30 (both times CAT) on Wednesday evenings.

It has been a very pleasant experience to meet with and greet all our old friends in amateur radio, and of course HAMNET, at the SARL Convention this weekend. The Cape Town Amateur Radio Centre is to be congratulated on organising a very successful weekend.

A pre-AGM get-together on Friday evening got the ball rolling and the atmosphere warmer, and I enjoyed saying hello to all the people in ham radio I admire. Then the AGM at a venue I have visited many times for congresses was successfully run without much controversy, and I congratulate those elected to the Council of the SARL for the forthcoming year.

That same venue has never disappointed me from their kitchen, and the spread was up to their usual standard at the Awards Dinner, while we listened to the leaders of council as they greeted us, and presented the annual awards. Thanks also to Brian ZS6YZ for his  presentation on our centenary history collection.

And a huge congratulations must go to Brian Jacobs ZS6YZ, our Deputy National Director, on being awarded the HAMNET Shield. I can’t think of a more worthy recipient. Actually I didn’t know he hadn’t already received the award! Well done Brian, and thank you for all your contributions to date.

Then further congratulations are due to HAMNET members from all regions, who were awarded Jack Twine awards, namely: Sybrand ZS1L, Peter ZS1OA, Danie ZS1OSS, Colin ZS1RS, Gawie ZS5R, Adele ZS5APT and Syd ZS5AYC, Awie ZS6AVI, Hentie ZS6HPL, Johan ZS6LD, Werner ZS6AR, Tommie ZS6THM and Lizette ZS6ZET.

SARL Certificates of Recognition for services to HAMNET were also awarded to Sydney ZS5SID, Louis ZS5LS, Deon ZS6DAB, Chanette ZS6CAC, Wynand ZS6JD, Theo ZS6JFW and Neels ZS6NR.

Thank you to you all for your contribution to the smooth running of HAMNET. My apologies if I seemed to be reading out a long shopping list there, but all awardees are worthy of thanks!

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

The Western and Southern Cape is still licking its wounds after the severe winds, heavy rain and in some places fires fanned by the wind, caused a lot of damage last Sunday and Monday. Informal settlements were hard hit, and donations of foodstuffs, potable water, dry clothing and building materials were hastily arranged, as always hugely sponsored by The Gift Of The Givers.

The Western Cape cleared up first of course, but Knysna and George were still struggling on Tuesday and Wednesday. I am aware of only one fatality, a security guard who was killed by a falling tree while patrolling on his quad bike. GDACS reported a total of 2779 buildings affected or destroyed, at least 26 schools damaged, and several highways closed across the Winelands, the Overberg and coastal regions.

Meanwhile the Western Cape government plans to ask the national Disaster Management Centre for a disaster classification following this devastating storm, with a view to organizing relief funds to aid stricken communities.

A huge high pressure cell has moved in behind this damaging cut-off low pressure frontal system, and sunny skies, gentle winds and mid-twenties temperatures are forecast for the Two Oceans Marathon which is being run this weekend, and for most of the coming week.

So while we were being battered by wind and rain, the Americas were making a festival of the Solar Eclipse, which swept across many states in the afternoon their time of Monday. As usual NASA does these Astronomical shows very well, and there was a running commentary on NASA TV during the entire passage across Mexico and the USA.

I happened to have time to watch the channel, and saw the Sun’s corona, the diamond ring effect, and the flare promontories several times. Baily’s beads, the glimpses of sunlight shining over the silhouette of the moon’s surface geography were also striking. Even without an understanding of all that’s going on during one, you have to be impressed by the astronomical phenomenon that is a total eclipse!

All the citizen science and ham science that was generated round about the eclipse hours will take a while to be analyzed, but I look forward to hearing the developments that arise and discoveries made.

Across the world, radio amateurs participated in the HamSCI Solar Eclipse QSO Party. It involved operating to gather log data. Those logs will be studied by researchers in the coming years to investigate further the sun’s impact on the ionosphere.

HamSCI’s programme leader Dr. Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, was active from The University of Scranton Amateur Radio Club station. “I’m happy to report that we had an excellent day at W3USR in Scranton and believe that we had fun and [also] collected good data,” he wrote in a message to the HamSCI team.

Greg Mossop G0DUB is managing a JS8Call activity period for IARU Region One today the 14^th April starting at 12h00 UTC, and lasting 2 hours. He had previously had interest shown by Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, South Africa, Norway, Netherlands and Ireland, and created objectives during the session, as follows:

To practice using JS8Call to relays short messages through other emergency communications groups;

To promote the use of the group call @R1EMCOR;

To send longer IARU format messages if conditions and confidence allow.

Frequencies to use will be 7.110 and 14.300 MHz

Greg says that there is no control station for this exercise and messages should be addressed to well-known members of the Region One Emergency Communications group.

He expects that it will be interesting to know how many Emergency Communications Groups were able to be worked, and how many IARU messages were sent or received. He notes that it can take about 3 minutes to send an IARU message using JS8Call at normal speed, but propagation conditions or QRM could break some messages. He reminds stations that a message is not “delivered” until a formal “ACK” is received from the receiving station.

Here’s something weird which will probably have lasting advantages in our drone-conscious lives. A team of biomedical, mechanical, and aerospace engineers from City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has developed a hopping robot by attaching a spring-loaded telescopic leg to the underside of a quadcopter. Their paper is published in the journal Science Robotics.

Quadcopters have become widely popular over the past several years for recreational use by the general public, a means of surveillance, and as a research tool—they do allow for unprecedented aerial viewing and sometimes for carrying payloads.

Two features of the flying robots that are notably in need of improvement are flight time and payload capacity. In this new study, the researchers working in Hong Kong have devised a means to overcome both problems.

The approach they developed involved adding a spring-loaded telescopic leg (essentially a pogo stick) beneath a standard quadcopter, allowing it to hop when necessary. To allow the leg to work properly, the researchers also added stabilizing capabilities.

Adding the hopping ability reduced battery drain, allowing for longer flight times. It also allowed the quadcopter to lift much heavier loads because it did not have to keep them aloft.

The researchers found that the robot could hop around as desired, moving easily from one location to another. It could also take flight mid-hop and then fly as a normal quadcopter. Testing showed that in addition to clean vertical hops, the robot was capable of hopping on uneven ground and could even hop horizontally, which meant the leg could be used as a bumper of sorts, preventing damage if the robot ran into a wall or other structure.

The researchers describe their robot as being the size of a bird with a low weight, approximately 35 grams. Among possible applications, they suggest it could be used to monitor wildlife, for example, hopping among branches high in the trees. It could also be used in disaster areas, helping in assessments and finding survivors, or as farm monitors, hopping from plant to plant testing soil and moisture levels.

Frankly this sounds a bit like one hop away from crazy, but there have been many innovations which started out like this, and ended up being very useful and very mainstream.

Thank you to Phys.org for drawing my attention to this one.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

In a report issued on Good Friday, Reuters says that the final casualty figure in Madagascar from Cyclone GAMANE in that week was 18 killed and thousands displaced.

Tropical cyclone Gamane, which crossed the northeast of Madagascar on Wednesday and Thursday, displaced more than 20,000 people, the National Bureau of Risk and Disaster Management (BNGRC) said in a report. Three others were injured and four were still missing, it added.

Gamane made landfall north of Vohémar in northeast Madagascar on Wednesday morning with average winds of 150 km per hour and gusts of 210 km per hour, BNGRC said late on Thursday.

It slowly dissipated on Thursday afternoon while still over land, the disaster management office said, having dumped heavy rain and caused flooding in many localities.

Roads and bridges collapsed in the north of Madagascar, BNRGC said.

Photographs posted on the disaster management office’s Facebook page showed its personnel wading in knee-deep water as they helped residents retrieve belongings from their flooded homes.

Gamane is the first this year in Madagascar’s cyclone and storm season.

Early last year, cyclone Freddy and tropical storm Cheneso killed at least 37 people and forced thousands from their homes.

It seems to have been big earthquake season this last two weeks. Of course, every day GDACS reports about 30 shakes of magnitude 5 or less, so earthquakes are not rare. But there have been a few more severe quakes reported.

The previous week there were strong quakes in Papua New Guinea, and off the coast of Indonesia. This week, a coastal area of Taiwan has been struck, and, as I write this on Friday evening, news of a medium strength earthquake in New York has just started to filter through.

Apparently a magnitude 4.8 quake struck the east coast of the US at about 17h20 CAT this Friday afternoon. It was felt from Philadelphia to Boston. Air traffic was immediately stopped, and only resumed about an hour later.

A magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck just south east of the coast of Taiwan at 23h58 UTC on the 2^nd April at a depth of 11.4km and 13km off the coast exposing a local population of 230000 to danger. GDACS reported nine deaths, 52 people still missing, over a thousand injured, and more than 130 still trapped in rubble.

A minor tsunami alert was issued and nearby Japanese and Philippine islands were placed on alert, but the wave measured 1.6 metres or less.

More than 300 aftershocks of up to magnitude 6.4 have been reported.

Hackaday.com notes that, in the past few years we’ve seen the rise of low-power mesh networking devices for everything from IoT devices, weather stations, and even off-grid communications networks. These radio modules are largely exempt from licensing requirements due to their low power and typically only operate within a very small area. But by borrowing some ideas from the licensed side of amateur radio, Peter Fairlie built a Meshtastic repeater which can greatly extend the range of his low-power system.

Peter is calling this a “long lines relay” after old AT&T microwave technology, but it is essentially two Heltec modules set up to operate as Meshtastic nodes, where one can operate as a receiver while the other re-transmits the received signal. Each is connected to a log-periodic antenna to greatly increase the range of the repeater along the direction of the antenna. These antennas are highly directional, [and pointing in opposite directions], but they allow Peter to connect to Meshtastic networks in the semi-distant city of Toronto which he otherwise wouldn’t be able to hear.

With the two modules connected to the antennas and enclosed in a weatherproof box, the system was mounted on a radio tower allowing a greatly increased range for these low-power devices. If you’re familiar with LoRa but not Meshtastic, it’s become somewhat popular lately for being a straightforward tool for setting up low-power networks for various tasks.

Including, I may add, emergency communications. I know HAMNET in various provinces is experimenting with Meshtastic low power radio networks.

CP24.com says that NASA wants to come up with an out-of-this-world way to keep track of time, putting the moon on its own souped-up clock.

It’s not quite a time zone like those on Earth, but an entire frame of time reference for the moon. Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad quicker – 58.7 microseconds every day actually – compared to Earth. So the White House Tuesday instructed NASA and other U.S agencies to work with international agencies to come up with a new moon-centric time reference system.

“An atomic clock on the moon will tick at a different rate than a clock on Earth,” said Kevin Coggins, NASA’s top communications and navigation official. “It makes sense that when you go to another body, like the moon or Mars that each one gets its own heartbeat.”

So everything on the moon will operate on the speeded-up moon time, Coggins said.

The last time NASA sent astronauts to the moon they wore watches, but timing wasn’t as precise and critical as it is now with GPS, satellites and intricate computer and communications systems, he said. Those microseconds matter when high tech systems interact, he noted.

Last year, the European Space Agency said Earth needs to come up with a unified time for the moon, where a day lasts 29.5 Earth days.

The International Space Station, being in low Earth orbit, will continue to use coordinated universal time or UTC. But just where the new space time kicks in is something that NASA has to figure out. Even Earth’s time speeds up and slows down, requiring leap seconds.

Unlike on Earth, the moon will not have daylight saving time, Coggins said.

The conspiracy theorists in North America seem to have drummed up a concern that cell phone coverage will be affected by Monday’s Eclipse. Cell phones use radio, after all, and we all know that radio waves are affected by an ionospheric disturbance.

Well, the good news is that the most likely disruption of cell phone coverage will be caused by excited people phoning each other to ooh and aah over the eclipse! Signals at about 900 MHz go straight through the ionosphere anyway, and cell phone towers rely on line-of-sight communications, all parallel to the earth’s surface to allow phone calls.

I doubt whether the eclipse will get in the way of those much, and certainly not very likely in South Africa.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.