Festival of Frequency Measurement Set to Honor WWV Centennial

HamSCI and the Case Amateur Radio Club of Case Western Reserve University (W8EDU) will sponsor a “Festival of Frequency Measurement” on WWV’s centennial, October 1, from 0000 to 2359 UTC (starting on Monday evening, September 30, in the Americas). The event invites radio amateurs, short-wave listeners, and others capable of making high-quality frequency measurements on HF to participate and publish their data to the HamSCI community on the Zenodo open-data sharing site.

“Changes in ionospheric electron density caused by space weather and diurnal solar changes are known to cause Doppler shifts on HF ray paths,” the event announcement says. “HamSCI’s first attempt at a measurement of these Doppler shifts was during the August 2017 total solar eclipse. We plan a careful measurement during the 2024 eclipse.”

Some of the questions the research event is hoping to answer include how WWV’s 5 MHz propagation path varies over a given calendar day, and how various measurement techniques for understanding the path variations compare. The objectives are to measure Doppler shifts caused by the effect of space weather on the ionosphere, and to use a specified measurement protocol available to Amateur Radio operators and other citizen-scientists. The experiment will use August 1, 2019 (UTC) as a control date.

“The recordings in this experiment are expected to show formations of the D-layer at stations’ local sunrise and other daily events of the ionosphere,” the announcement said. “Space weather varies day to day and some features may be prominent. We’ll see what we get!”

Full information is on the Festival of Frequency Measurement website