Hot on the heels of last week’s Tropical Cyclone YAGI, comes BEBINCA, with a fairly similar trajectory, only slightly more east of YAGI’s trail, and therefore missing the Philippines, but still aimed squarely at the coast of China.
It was first reported on Monday, having arisen in the North West Pacific, close to the island of Guam, and aiming north-west towards China as mentioned. On its way, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the southernmost tip of Japan were to experience maximum wind speeds of 185km/h. About 1.2 million people were threatened in its path.
By Tuesday, China was included in the warning, and nearly 16 million people were threatened with winds of up to 120km/h. On Wednesday a RED alert was issued by GDACS, and average wind speeds for the entire path were estimated at 194km/h. The number of people at risk had risen to 25 million or more.
Fortunately, the storm abated a bit by Thursday, probably crossing the central Ryukyu islands of Japan today (Sunday), and headed for the eastern coast of Zhejiang Province in eastern China tomorrow (Monday). By Saturday, wind speeds had dropped to about 100km/h, and it was classified as a tropical storm. That is a huge relief for those countries, faced with the possibility of two major typhoons in 2 weeks!
The final statistics of storm YAGI, by the way, showed 152 deaths, 80 people missing, 872 injured souls, and 124000 people evacuated to safety, in Philippines, Vietnam and China.
In the Caribbean, Tropical Cyclone FRANCINE developed quite quickly midweek, and by Thursday had made landfall in Louisiana, south west of New Orleans as a category two storm. Luckily it quickly weakened to a category one storm, with wind speeds in the 80km/h range. It was moving northeast toward Mississippi at 20km/h.
A turn to the north northeast was expected on Friday, with some reduction in forward speed. The ARRL letter for Thursday the 12th notes that Ham radio operators volunteering with the ARRL® Amateur Radio Emergency Service® (ARES®) have successfully completed operations for Hurricane FRANCINE, now regarded as a tropical storm. “We had a huge positive showing of ARES team members checking in and doing the ‘thing.’ I sincerely appreciate everyone leaning into this activation,” said Robert Hayes, KC5IMN, Section Emergency Coordinator of the ARRL Mississippi Section.
At least 419,942 people were without power early Thursday morning. PowerOutage.us reported 392,440 people without power in Louisiana and 27,502 in Mississippi.
The Hurricane Watch Net secured operations but remains at HWN Alert Level 2 monitoring mode. During their 14-hour activation, Net Manager Bobby Graves said they collected and forwarded surface reports from south eastern Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the National Hurricane Centre by way of WX4NHC. A total of 58 reports were submitted to WX4NHC, the amateur radio station at the National Hurricane Centre, some of which were used in NHC Advisories and Tropical Cyclone Updates. Reports ranged from wind damage to buildings, tree and wire damage reports, coastal storm surge flooding, wind measurement, rain gauge and rain-related street flooding reports.
Thanks to the ARRL for those excerpts from their letter.
An enterprising fellow with call sign AA7FO has gone to the trouble of converting the entire book written by HG Wells called “War of the Worlds” into Morse code in 214 mp3 files. This is as practice for people wishing to increase their copy speed. The first 29 files are set at 20 words per minute, the next 30 at 22 WPM, and the final 154 files at 24 WPM. So this is for the serious code enthusiast, but still an interesting way of challenging one with fast Morse and interesting subject matter.
For those that don’t remember, Wikipaedia says that The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson’s Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extra-terrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother who escapes to Tillingham in Essex as London and southern England is invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.
It is best remembered for the magnificent and dramatic way in which Orson Wells, who was no relation to the author, produced a CBS radio show in October 1938, which was interrupted by a series of “Breaking News” flashes, announcing that the world had been invaded by Martians. A large number of listeners were taken in by the broadcast, having missed the original announcement that the entire show was a work of fiction.
Poor old Orson Wells had his work cut out apologizing at a hastily called news conference the next morning, as the public outrage continued, but he gained the reputation of an innovative storyteller and trickster.
Anyway, you can go to www.aa7fo.com/war-of-the-worlds.html/ for the practice files.
While we are in space, I thought you ought to know that the average age of a GPS satellite is now 13 years, with half of them exceeding their designed lifespan.
Payloadspace.com says that the USA-132 satellite broke the record for the oldest GPS satellite in history, having completed 27+ years in operation. While the record is an indicator of the reliability and robust engineering of the GPS satellite, it also means that the service still relies on hardware built in the 1990s.
The Global Positioning System has long been one of the most important and widely-used services in the world but the US navigational network is showing signs of aging, slipping into a pattern of maintaining the status quo rather than driving innovation.
The history of GPS goes all the way back to the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. George Weiffenbach and William Guier of the John Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory found that they could track the satellite’s location by analysing its radio signal.
This discovery paved the way for the US’s first, but limited, satellite-based geo-positioning system, dubbed “Transit,” in the 1960s.
Ever-increasing Cold War tensions drove the military’s need to improve the timing and positioning services, leading to the development of a new and improved version, the Navigation System with Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR).
NAVSTAR is the GPS system we know today. There are currently 31 GPS satellites in orbit, and the threshold for adequate cover is regarded as 24.
This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR, who has no idea where he is if he doesn’t use GPS satellites, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.