Kenya is again the victim of a tropical cyclone, this one called IALY. Heavy rainfall, strong wind and storm surge connected to the passage of the tropical cyclone IALY over the western Indian Ocean have been affecting the coastal area of Kenya over the last 48 hours, causing a number of severe weather related incidents, mainly due to the strong wind and storm surge that have resulted in casualties and damage.

Media report, as of 23 May, two fatalities and six injured people across the Kilifi county, south-eastern Kenya. In addition, media also report damages to infrastructure across the mentioned Kilifi county and the neighbouring Mombasa county.

Over the next 48 hours, more heavy rainfall with locally very heavy rainfall is still forecasted over the coastal area of Kenya.

The ARRL reports in its weekly newsletter that the 2024 National Convention at Dayton’s Hamvention was a huge success.

The convention theme, “Be radio active,” was played out in a variety of ARRL-sponsored exhibits, presentations, and activities. One particular focus area was on youth involvement in amateur radio. On Saturday, ARRL hosted a Youth Rally that drew dozens of young people for an all-day immersion into ham radio interests and activities. “It was great to see the kids fired up about ham radio,” said ARRL Education and Learning Manager Steve Goodgame, K5ATA. “They got to make radio contact with a parachute mobile station, learn about satellites, and really put radio concepts into action.” In his forum, “Youth Outreach Through Amateur Radio STEM Education,” Goodgame shared the keys to success ARRL has found in helping grow interest in radio among the next generation. A video recording of the forum is available on the ARRLHQ YouTube channel. In a follow-up to a previous bulletin, where I talked about radio jamming devices being declared illegal in the US, here’s a story of their misuse.

In Groves, Texas, officers were sent to a home on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, where police were told that four or five masked men were attempting to break in to a home, according to a news release. 

After officers found that the home had indeed been invaded, they spotted two of the suspects in a nearby field and arrested them following a brief foot chase.

Officers searched the suspects and found a radio “jamming device” in a backpack that they believe was being used during the burglary, according to the release.

Jamming radio signals is against federal law, according to the FCC website.

“Federal law prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment that interferes with authorized radio communications, including cellular and Personal Communication Services (PCS), police radar, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS),” according to the FCC.

I wonder whether would-be burglars in this country have become this sophisticated yet…

Newsonair.gov.in reports from India of a pioneering move towards reinforcing disaster communication capabilities, in which the Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority (NSDMA) has embarked on a ground-breaking initiative in collaboration with Open Source Classes for Amateur Radio India (OSCAR INDIA). Towards this, the NSDMA conducted a comprehensive mock drill exercise utilizing amateur radio technology on May 9.

This marks a significant milestone as the first-of-its-kind effort in enhancing alternative communication methods during emergencies. The state is also preparing to be the first disaster management authority in the country to enter into HAM Radio Technology for emergency communication systems.

Joint Chief Executive Officer of NSDMA, Johnny Ruangmei during a press briefing held at Nagaland Civil Secretariat Kohima today, informed that a mock drill was conducted which was also a first of its kind using HAM Radio technology, stating that it was a good lesson learned.

Phys.org is reporting this weekend of a potential forward leap in battery charging technology.

Imagine if your dead laptop or phone (or handheld radio) could charge in a minute or if an electric car could be fully powered in 10 minutes.

While not possible yet, new research by a team of CU Boulder scientists could potentially lead to such advances.

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Ankur Gupta’s lab discovered how tiny charged particles, called ions, move within a complex network of minuscule pores. The breakthrough could lead to the development of more efficient energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors, said Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.

“Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my chemical engineering knowledge to advancing energy storage devices,” Gupta said. “It felt like the topic was somewhat underexplored and, as such, the perfect opportunity.”

Gupta explained that several chemical engineering techniques are used to study flow in porous materials such as oil reservoirs and water filtration, but they have not been fully utilized in some energy storage systems.

The discovery is significant not only for storing energy in vehicles and electronic devices but also for power grids, where fluctuating energy demand requires efficient storage to avoid waste during periods of low demand and to ensure rapid supply during high demand.

Supercapacitors, energy storage devices that rely on ion accumulation in their pores, have rapid charging times and longer life spans compared to batteries.

“The primary appeal of supercapacitors lies in their speed,” Gupta said. “So how can we make their charging and release of energy faster? By the more efficient movement of ions.”

Their findings modify Kirchhoff’s law, which has governed current flow in electrical circuits since 1845 and is a staple in high school students’ science classes. Unlike electrons, ions move due to both electric fields and diffusion, and the researchers determined that their movements at pore intersections are different from what was described in Kirchhoff’s law.

Prior to the study, ion movements were only described in the literature in one straight pore. Through this research, ion movement in a complex network of thousands of interconnected pores can be simulated and predicted in a few minutes.

“That’s the leap of the work,” Gupta said. “We found the missing link.”

And I’m quite sure this Professor Gupta is not a previously unidentified brother of the Guptas we have come to know and distrust in this country.

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

The news bulletins and the press in the Western Cape are of course concentrating on the disastrous building collapse in George, where 81 workers were still busy building the structure. It was apparently to be a 5 storey building, with a basement and a ground-floor parking area, and 4 stories of apartments.

As of Saturday afternoon, 13 deaths had been reported amongst those removed from the rubble, 19 survivors had been hospitalized (of which one was air-lifted to Groote Schuur hospital for highly intensive care), and 39 souls were still trapped in the rubble. The 19^th survivor was miraculously pulled out of the rubble yesterday afternoon, 120 hours after the collapse. It is now more than 140 hours since the disaster, and likelihood of finding those still trapped alive diminishes with each passing hour.

The airspace over the site has been declared a no-fly zone, so that a rescue drone has total freedom over the area. Heavy duty earth moving equipment has been brought in, to remove more rubble more quickly, but is going very carefully and slowly, in case further collapse as a result of major rubble shifts occurs. Forensic medical services are operating at the site, to be able to help with fast identification of victims.

Our thoughts are with the families still waiting for news of their loved ones, and with the teams of rescuers, from a variety of agencies, who are working around the clock to find them.

There being no need for unusual communications efforts at the scene, HAMNET has neither offered our services, or been asked for them.

Meanwhile, there are heavy rains and floods all over the world. In the last week, reports have come from Indonesia, India, Brazil, Texas, Tanzania, Kenya, Haiti, and Iraq, and there are flood warnings out for Belarus, Ukraine, Belgium and Germany. There have been many deaths, even more injuries, loss of many dwellings with displacement of thousands of people, and humanitarian aid organizations being stretched to the limit.

I suppose we must be grateful that the circulation of water becoming salty as it runs into the sea, evaporating into the clouds, and then being released as salt-free water in the mountains for us to drink, is maintained, but sometimes it is just too much of a good thing!

On top of all this, the sun is displaying a whole lot of aggression as it nears the peak of solar cycle 25, and producing ever more frequent large groupings of sunspots, which are resulting in solar flares, leading to coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), issued an updated warning on Friday afternoon of a severe G4 level geomagnetic storm likely to occur either that evening, or possibly yesterday and today. The Space Weather Prediction Centre says that currently, we are experiencing the first G4 Watch since 2005. They reported on Friday at least 7 earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejections in transit to Earth. Each of these CME’s comes from a high intensity solar flare, and all of them have arisen from complex sunspot cluster named Region 3664. This sunspot group is currently 16 times the diameter of Earth, and hasn’t stopped partying yet, so there is more to come, before it drifts off the western limb of the sun and around the back.

The associated geomagnetic storms, as the CME’s slam into Earth’s magnetosphere can trip out powerlines, affect radio (which means us), and of course GPS navigational systems, as well as charge up the surface of spacecraft systems, increase drag on low earth orbit satellites, and cause tracking and orientation problems.

On Friday night, a G5 geomagnetic storm alert was issued, which is as strong as it gets, and the resulting storm was experienced.  Coupled with a Planetary K index of 9 (also the maximum measurable), the bands were completely closed. I doubt whether communications were much good for this weekend’s International Mill Weekend.

On the other hand, outstanding aurora reports have been issued, and I’m sure lots of you have seen the pictures of auroras, or witnessed them yourselves, from the south-western Cape, and even from Kuruman, which is only 27.5 degrees of latitude away from the equator! By midday Saturday, as I write this, the K index is still 9, so the storm is not over yet and the auroras may be nearly as widespread this Saturday night. However, I hope you will have gone out after about 10 and looked around. And if you couldn’t see anything, I hope you tried taking a picture with your smartphone camera. Its spectral range is wider than your eyes can see, and you might have seen things there you didn’t actually witness.

From Sciencenews.com, Meghan Rosen writes that the anti-venom for a black mamba’s bite could one day work for a slew of other snakes. 

Scientists have developed an antibody that shuts down paralyzing toxins in the venom of black mambas, king cobras and dozens of other sharp-toothed serpents. The antibody — a single protein manufactured in the lab — protected mice from otherwise lethal doses of venom, protein engineer Joseph Jardine and colleagues report in the Feb. 21 Science Translational Medicine. That antibody “will be a critical component of an eventual anti-venom,” says Jardine, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

Venomous snakes generally rely on just a handful of toxin families. If scientists could mix together antibodies targeting each of those types, Jardine says, they could potentially create “one vial of anti-venom that works against any snake in the world.” Such a universal anti-venom might still be many years away, he says. But “theoretically, this is possible.”

The old anti-venom  technology involved  injecting animals like horses or sheep with snake venom and harvesting the venom-targeting antibodies that their immune systems churn out. A snakebitten patient would then get an infusion of horse or sheep antibodies — if doctors have them in stock. 

The new generic antibody targets a portion of snake venom protein that is common to all types of venom, and which might then be effective in a variety of snakebites. Jardine and his colleagues recommend however that anti-venoms be developed for all the snakes in specific areas, rather than the entire planet, because an antibody to a smaller group of snake venoms is more likely to be 100% effective.

When one realises how scarce snakebite anti-venom actually is, one easily understands the value of a generic mix specific to one’s own region, particularly if it is readily available.

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

The Otago Daily Times, in New Zealand reports that a group of teenagers lost in the Southland bush have been praised by police for making the right decision by notifying emergency services and staying put for help.

Police said they were notified at 8.15pm on Friday the 26^th April that a group of teenagers had unexpectedly been caught out while walking the Makarewa Falls track in the Hokonui Hills, Southland.

As the group started to lose daylight they also lost the track route and became lost.

When they realised they were in trouble, the group alerted police by using the SOS function on their cellphone before lighting a fire.

Invercargill police search and rescue co-ordinator Sergeant Alun Griffiths said a group of 10 Land Search and Rescue volunteers, supported by Amateur Radio Emergency Communications, was deployed and the group was located shortly after midnight.

The group arrived in the carpark at 2am in good health despite some miserable weather conditions, police said.

The boys did all the right things and stayed calm, Sgt Griffiths said.

Continuing its studies into Infrared Laser Communications, NASA’s Psyche’s mission team has been testing a new communication system. The new approach doesn’t use radio waves but an infrared laser and it has now shown that it works successfully from the most distant place yet. Psyche was 226 million kilometres from Earth when the message was sent. That’s 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Psyche was transmitting its engineering data over radio waves through NASA’s Deep Space Network. The mission team decided to also transmit the data over the Deep Space Optical Communication system for the first time. The previous transmissions were not data from the spacecraft but test data.

The April 8 test showed that even from that distance, the data could be downloaded with a maximum rate of 25 Mbps. This is already well beyond the expected goal of “at least 1 Mbps” and is 10 to 100 times faster than radio transmissions.

“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche. This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system.”

 The technology continues to show promise but there are still a few problems that need to be ironed out. For example, optical observations are blocked by clouds. Radio communications do not suffer from this issue.

“We’ve learned a great deal about how far we can push the system when we do have clear skies, although storms have interrupted operations at both Table Mountain and Palomar [receiving stations] on occasion,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.

I thought you’d like to know something interesting about South Africa’s favourite alarm clock bird – the dreaded Hadeda, or Glossy Ibis.

Various ibises and shorebirds (like sandpipers) are able to use the “sixth sense” of remote-touch. This allows them to detect vibrations in soil and water, and use this information to locate invisible buried prey items. When they hunt for soft-bodied prey (such as earthworms), these vibrations result from the movement of prey in the soil. The birds can sense these vibrations using a special sensory organ in their beaks, called a bill-tip organ, which evolved during the time of the dinosaurs.

In recently published research from her Ph.D. at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology and reported on in Phys.org, Dr Carla du Toit has shown that Hadedas have this sixth sense too—something that had been assumed based on the anatomy of their beaks but never tested. In addition, she and her co-authors discovered an added twist to their sixth sense—their ability to use it is closely tied to the amount of water in the soil. This has likely played a role in Hadedas’ range expansion, and has global implications for key groups of wading birds.

They tested Hadedas housed in free-flight aviaries at a bird sanctuary, presenting them with trays filled with soil, in which they buried several worms. They knew the birds couldn’t see the buried worms, but they also needed to make sure they weren’t using hearing or scent to find them. They therefore masked any sounds the worms made by playing white noise from a speaker next to the trays. To ensure the Hadedas couldn’t smell the worms, they mixed crushed worms into the soil.

Neither of these affected how quickly Hadedas found their prey. So they concluded that they weren’t using hearing or scent to locate the worms in their experiments.

To test whether Hadedas were able to use remote-touch, the researchers gave them either live worms (which moved around and produced vibrations) or dead worms (which did not produce vibrations). The birds were able to find the moving worms significantly faster than the dead ones, indicating that they are able to sense vibrations, and use them to find prey in the absence of all other sensory information.

The mechanical waves (vibrations) that the birds sense are transmitted better in liquids than in gases, so Dr du Toit predicted that Hadedas would be more successful at detecting vibrations (and finding prey) in wetter substrates. Once they had established that Hadedas could use remote-touch, they tested how adding different amounts of water to the soil affected how quickly they located their prey, as this could be a factor that affects where they are able to forage.

When they were using remote-touch, the birds located the worms significantly faster in wetter soils, supporting the prediction. If they were given dead worms (no vibrations), adding water to the soil had no effect on their prey capture rate, so it wasn’t simply because the wetter soils were easier to dig around in. If the soil was too dry, Hadedas lost their ability to sense living worms faster than dead ones. This indicates that they could not use remote-touch in dry soils, and were instead having to rely on random probing to find prey.

And all along, you, like I, thought the hadedas were just plain simple lunatic birds. I wonder whether we could harness them for emergency comms, by getting them to signal looming danger at great distances. Their raucous cries will certainly carry for kilometres.

Thank you to Phys.org for these excerpts from Dr du Toit’s research.

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