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 14th 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.