Things I Learned: We have enough data to watch the ionosphere descend

I dropped the antenna this morning and all of a suddne, the RockMite's signal into Utah was back. This afternoon? Utah appeared again. We know why.

First, in the morning, I didn't actually 'drop' the antenna, not to say I haven't before, but this time I lowered it on purpose to see what would happen. Andddddd when I did, the Utah SDR which we've been invisible to most of the day lately, found the RockMite immediately.

It's been kind of a pain disappearing from this station, because for the rest of the year, it provided a nice safety net. Is the radio working? I don't know, check the Utah SDR.

The antenna's launch angle is supposed to increase when the antenna is lowered, so a hypothesis began to form—the ionosphere is 'too' high.

Last night, the kid and I were able to test the hypothesis. We'd set the RockMite picokeyer up on beacon mode, and were listening to a number of SDRs in the other room in case anyone responded to our CQ calls repeating every 90 seconds or so. We heard nothing because

A. no one was responding

B. the Utah SDR couldn't see us.

Then! The Utah SDR booomed out our CQ as the kid was studying for her ham exam. (And seriously she'd just been studying a question related to the F layer.) We verified this was the case by switching to the SDR tab. Sure enough. Then, we checked the ionogram from Pt. Arguello.

In the fifteen minutes or so leading up to being able to hear the station, the F2 layer dropped, and then kind of kerplunked:

See the movie above as well.

Note when we appeared on the RBN in Utah as well!

I don't know if this is the only cause for what we observed, but it's definitely a cause that does correlate. It's sooo nice to be able to get so much data!

Comments

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog