In a strange turn to last week’s research telling us that Emma Kindstrom had proved that the pain signal from hair-pulling travelled the fastest of all pain signals, we have received an email from Emma, telling us she was delighted to see our mention of her research in the HAMNET Bulletin, because she is in fact also a radio amateur! So I am now going to append her call-sign to last week’s paragraphs, and tell you she is Emma Kindstrom, SA5NOX. Thanks for the email, Emma.
GDACS notified us of a magnitude 6 earthquake at a depth of 10km in the province of Malatya, Turkiye, at 07h46 UTC on Wednesday the 16th. This is in roughly the same area as the magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 quakes of 20 months ago, in which 56000 people lost their lives. A population of over 100000 was exposed to severe shaking, and about 200 injured souls reported on, but luckily so far no fatalities reported.
The ARRL letter of Thursday the 17th says that a team of 161 amateur radio operators from five Midwest states assisted the 2000 medical personnel volunteering for the Bank of America Chicago Marathon on October 13, 2024. Some 52,000 runners entered the event that featured a chilly, windy, day and saw many personal best times and a world record time for the women. More than 100 countries were represented.
This is the 16th year that amateur radio operators have partnered with the medical teams to help coordinate responses, arrange for medical re-supplies, and provide situational awareness for the organizers. This year, Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) was used by the pre-finish team, a group of 25 hams who are staged with medical personnel on a line about every 200 yards on the last mile of the course. The medical people had automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and other supplies, while the hams radio for ambulance support. DMR allowed the hams to have two channels on one frequency and permitted them to manage the traffic better when patient load was higher.
There were more than 35 newly-trained ham radio operators, and all were new to the event as well. Online training events were offered and then the new operators were paired with more experienced personnel for the event. Organizers said that amateur radio is important to the marathon, but it is just one small component of a very complex event that requires 10,000 volunteers to be successful. Amateur radio has a unique role and works alongside the other many specialty service groups required to support an event of this magnitude.
“We are grateful to the many hams who have shared their expertise, time, and resources over the years,” said Robert Orr, Volunteer Lead for the Bank of America Chicago Marathon. “This event has shown that ham radio is very much alive and doing well.”
The big weekend for Scouts around the world is here. The ARRL also notes that Jamboree On – The – Air (JOTA) and Jamboree On – The – Internet (JOTI) is the world’s largest Scouting event. The three-day event has run from October 18 until today, using amateur radio and the internet to connect Scouts worldwide for a full weekend of on-air and online activities that promote friendship and global citizenship. In 2023, JOTA/JOTI had a record 600,000 registered participants, a 40% increase compared to 2022, and included 7000+ Scout groups and tens of thousands of individual participants from 149 countries.
When Scouts contact each other by amateur radio, the stations are operated by licensed amateur radio operators. Many Scouts and their leaders hold licenses and have their own stations, but the majority participate in JOTA through stations operated by local radio clubs and individual radio amateurs. Some operators use television or computer-linked communication. This technology offers Scouts the exciting opportunity to make friends in other countries without leaving home.
Participating using JOTI, Scouts of any age can take part, from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts and Venturers. Scouts may participate at home with the help of an adult, or they can participate in a Scout group at a council event. JOTI is an economical way to participate in an international jamboree and participation fulfils requirements for Tiger and Arrow of Light adventures, the Citizenship in the World merit badge, and the International Spirit Award.
Thanks to the ARRL for both these sets of inserts.
A nearby star system has just served as the proving ground for a new technique to search for signs of extra-terrestrial life.
As detailed in a study set to be published in The Astronomical Journal, astronomers have developed a method that allows alien hunters to listen for much smaller bandwidth radio signals, resembling what we use to communicate with our own spacecraft.
To test it, they set their sights on the TRAPPIST-1 star system, which is only 41 light years away. At its centre is a cool red dwarf, surrounded by seven rocky, Earth-sized exoplanets, three of which orbit within their star’s habitable zone, which means they could harbour water and support life.
While they didn’t pick up on any alien techno-signatures, they successfully demonstrated that their technique worked. If applied elsewhere in the cosmos, it could be used to pick up on communications that weren’t intended to reach deep space.
“Most searches assume a powerful signal, like a beacon intended to reach distant planets, because our receivers have a sensitivity limit to a minimum transmitter power beyond anything we unintentionally send out,” said study lead author Nick Tusay, an astronomer at Penn State University, in a statement about the work. “But, with better equipment, like the upcoming Square Kilometre Array, we might soon be able to detect signals from an alien civilization communicating with its spacecraft.”
If an alien civilization was like ours, they might be sending plenty of radio signals between their system’s planets, perhaps to off-world probes and rovers. These communications would be made over narrowband radio signals, which require less power to send out. Because they’re smaller, however, they’re also much harder to detect at great distances.
To compensate for this, the team waited for what’s known as planet-planet occultations to occur. This is when one planet passes in front of another from our perspective on Earth (like a solar eclipse), providing a rare chance to catch radio “spill-over” of a signal being sent from the further world to the nearer one.
In hopes of snagging one of these communications, the researcher used the Allan Telescope Array, a large series of radio telescopes, to scan TRAPPIST-1 for an impressive 28 hours — the longest single-target search in the star system.
During this window, around seven possible planet-planet occultations were predicted to have occurred, producing around 2,200 candidate radio signals that coincided with the astronomical events.
None of these turned out to be the work of little green men. The fact that they were able to identify promising signals at all, however, is proof enough that their technique could pick up on day-to-day radio signals in other stellar neighbourhoods.
“The TRAPPIST-1 system is relatively close to Earth, and we have detailed information about the orbit of its planets, making it an excellent natural laboratory to test these techniques,” Tusay said. “The methods and algorithms that we developed for this project can eventually be applied to other star systems and can increase our chances of finding regular communications among planets beyond our solar system, if they exist.”
This is Dave Reece, ZS1DFR, struggling to get a WhatsApp message to his daughter 15km away, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.