Combined Technologies Help Astronomers Fight RFI

/
Combined Technologies Help Astronomers Fight RFI

An unlikely source of RFI that was compromising signals received by a radio telescope in Western Australia has been identified as an airplane deflecting broadcast signals. Realising that the ever-growing presence of orbiting satellites may pose the same hazard, causing astronomers' data to become contaminated, scientists have devised what they hope is a solution.

The stray signals that were interfering with the sensitive telescopes in the Murchison Widefield Array were even more puzzling because the array is an area designated by the government as a radio quiet zone. Stranger still, the signal turned out to be a broadcast signal from Australian TV and appeared to move across the sky. Researchers at Brown University in the US who are involved with the Murchison project, determined that an airplane had been deflecting the signal, and had likely been doing so for nearly five years.

Read More

Get Ready for Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio

/

What amateur radio operating strategy combines a little bit of being mobile, a little bit of fixed and - if you so choose - a little bit of maritime? It’s spelled R a D A R, which is the acronym for Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio. Get ready, RaDAR Rally day is just weeks away.

Eddie Leighton, ZS6BNE pioneered the operating concept more than a decade ago in South Africa with an event known as the RaDAR Challenge which was embraced worldwide by portable operators. This year the RaDAR Rally, which takes place on April 5th, keeps the spirit and the strategy of the original challenge. The four-hour rally is particularly appealing to hams who are accustomed to working portable outdoors and this is an activity that can be combined with Summits On The Air and Parks On The Air. Operators spend four hours setting up a station as quickly as possible, making five contacts, then dismantling the station and moving to another location to do the same thing again. According to the rules, the required distances vary depending on whether the radio operator is walking, cycling, driving or even canoeing. All bands and modes are acceptable but use of terrestrial repeaters is not.

More Information - http://www.radarrally.info

Broadcast Students Get Schooled in Amateur Radio

/
Broadcast Students Get Schooled in Amateur Radio

A Maryland high school where students learning about professional radio have fallen in love with the amateur side of things.

There was electricity in the air - or perhaps it was electromagnetism - when high school students in Kent County, Maryland, participated in their first ARRL School Club Roundup last fall. With the support and some loaned equipment from the Kent Amateur Radio Society, K3ARS, the students logged contacts in the US and a number of others overseas. For them it was "a pivotal moment," the radio society president, Chris Cote, KE5NJ, told Newsline. He said it exceeded everyone's expectations.

Earlier this year, the sparks flew again, in a manner of speaking, during Winter Field Day. Some of the teens, who are involved with WKHS, Kent County High School's FM radio station, returned to experience once more what the amateur side of the medium can do - and just how far it can go - by calling CQ from the school parking lot with members of KARS.

Read More