The Brakpan Herald is noting, in citizen.co.za, that the emergency communications division of the South Africa Radio League (SARL), HAMNET, is setting up a massive communications network to provide critical radio communications at the Ride for Sight cycle race on February 16, that’s today, to ensure the safe and efficient running of the event.

SARL HAMNET is part of the organizing committee of the Retina South Africa Dis-Chem Ride for Sight event to be held at Boksburg Stadium. HAMNET’s dedicated team of communications specialists will be responsible for establishing a venue operations centre (VOC) with three radio networks to manage communications for the event.

All resources on the road assisting the cyclists are tracked with a tracking system so that at all times the VOC personnel comprising of fire, medical, traffic, Road Angels and other organizations know exactly where everyone is and which resources are the closest to where an incident has taken place and where help is needed.

HAMNET also has their members monitoring the five water points along the route, ready to assist if supplies are getting low and are also supporting ten sweep vehicles which are manned by qualified and licensed radio amateurs and basic life support (BLS) first aiders who patrol the route, ready to assist any cyclist in need. All are tracked and in radio contact with the VOC.

It will also provide an emergency phone system making MySoS available to cyclists to call for assistance. When a cyclist pushes the help button on the MySoS app on his smartphone, a marker immediately appears on a large map at the VOC showing where the cyclist is and all the resources available closest to the cyclist.

I look forward to having a report perhaps, straight from the horses’ mouths, so to speak, in next week’s bulletin.

The science world is abuzz with a triple whammy observation from outer space picked up on Thursday the 6^th February. It very seldom happens that any astronomical or cosmological event is noticed using more than one type of electromagnetic, gravitational, or quantum technique at the same time.

I have written previously about observatories developed to watch for gravitational waves, which would distort space-time, and predicted by Albert Einstein at least 100 years ago. There are currently two Light Interferometry Gravitational Observatories, abbreviated to LIGO, one in America, and the other in Italy, and more on the way. If a cosmic event is big enough it will disturb the gravitational field of the universe, causing ripples like seen in a pond after you drop a stone in the water, but disturbing gravity, and able to be detected everywhere simultaneously.

Well, there was a major Gravitational Wave disturbance last Tuesday, measured in the LIGO experiments, and deemed to be coming from a specific spot about a billion light years away in the Universe.

Very shortly thereafter, a Neutrino detector buried deep under the ice in Antarctica detected a burst of Neutrinos coming from the same direction, but taking a minute or so longer to get here, and also measured to have come from the direction of the gravitational disturbance just felt.

This got scientists curious, and so they canvassed all observatories for anything unusual, and a radio observatory in Canada, dedicated to detecting Fast Radio Bursts (FRB’s) reported a similar observation, but about a day later, and also coming from the exact spot where the Gravity waves and the Neutrinos had come from.

Interesting that the gravitational disturbance was detected before the neutrinos arrived and also before the radio waves did. I thought radio waves travelled at the speed of light, and nothing travelled faster than that!

The source of Fast Radio Bursts is still not understood. Extremely massive magnetic sources, called Magnetars, are currently the chief suspects, but with gravity waves and extra unexpected Neutrinos to think about, all three types of astronomical observations may allow scientists to develop better explanations for their own phenomena. So watch this space – knowledge can only grow with these types of events.

Techxplore.com reports this week that engineers have enabled a drone to determine its position in the dark, and indoors. In the future, autonomous drones could be used to shuttle inventory between large warehouses. A drone might fly into a semi-dark structure the size of several football fields, zipping along hundreds of identical aisles before docking at the precise spot where its shipment is needed.

Most of today’s drones would likely struggle to complete this task, since drones typically navigate outdoors using GPS, which doesn’t work in indoor environments. For indoor navigation, some drones employ computer vision or LIDAR, but both techniques are unreliable in dark environments or rooms with plain walls or repetitive features.

MIT researchers have introduced a new approach that enables a drone to self-localize, or determine its position, in indoor, dark, and low-visibility environments. Self-localization is a key step in autonomous navigation. The researchers developed a system called MiFly, in which a drone uses radio frequency (RF) waves, reflected by a single (RF) tag placed in its environment, to autonomously self-localize.

Because MiFly enables self-localization with only one small tag, which could be affixed to a wall like a sticker, it would be cheaper and easier to implement than systems that require multiple tags. In addition, since the MiFly tag reflects signals sent by the drone, rather than generating its own signal, it can be operated with very low power.

Two off-the-shelf radars mounted on the drone enable it to localize in relation to the tag. Those measurements are fused with data from the drone’s onboard computer, which enables it to estimate its trajectory. The researchers conducted hundreds of flight experiments with real drones in indoor environments, and found that MiFly consistently localized the drone to within fewer than 7 centimetres.

“As our understanding of perception and computing improves, we often forget about signals that are beyond the visible spectrum. Here, we’ve looked beyond GPS and computer vision to millimeter waves, and by doing so, we’ve opened up new capabilities for drones in indoor environments that were not possible before,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab, and senior author of a paper on MiFly.

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