Funding for National Radio Archive

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Essex Member of Parliament, John Whittingdale has announced £9,568,900 for the British Library's Save Our Sounds project to digitise the UK’s rare, unique and most vulnerable sound recordings and open them up online for people to hear

The British Library Save Our Sounds site describes one of its aims as being "to establish a national radio archive that will collect, protect and share a substantial part of the UK’s vibrant radio output, working with the radio industry and other partners".

Government announcement - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-heritage-projects-awarded-nearly-100m

British Library - Save Our Sounds - http://www.bl.uk/projects/save-our-sounds

Liquid Metal Antenna

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A liquid metal antenna can tune over a range of at least two times greater than systems using electronic switches 

Researchers at the North Carolina State University (NCSU) have demonstrated a reconfigurable liquid-metal prototype in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Published in a paper titled by the university, they describe how a reconfigurable liquid metal antenna driven by electrochemically controlled capillarity is a new electrochemical method for reversible, pump-free control of liquid eutectic gallium and indium (EGaIn) in a capillary.

Antennas are interesting as the shape and length of the conducting paths which form them determine their operating frequencies and radiation patterns.

“Using a liquid metal – such as eutectic gallium and indium – that can change its shape allows us to modify antenna properties more dramatically than is possible with a fixed conductor,”
— Jacob Adams, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NCSU

Ham Radio Licenses for CubeSat Students

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The University of Iowa students are conducting Van Allen radiation belt experiment with the AMSAT Fox CubeSat 

Thanks to a proposal by the University of Iowa (UI) Department of Physics and Astronomy, a group of senior electrical and computer engineering students will reenact James Van Allen’s original experiment - this time with updated technology. Group members Kevin Klosterman KD9CPF, Bryan Senchuk KD9CPD, Tyler Dunkel KE0CHR, and Patrick Maloney KD9CPD took on the task as a part of their senior design project for the College of Engineering.

“I feel like we’ve learned something new every day”
— Kevin Klosterman, KD9CPF

The group is trying to figure out how much energy is emanating from the Van Allen belts at a specific altitude. To measure that, they’ve built a radiation sensor attached to a circuit board that will launch into space on a small satellite. There, the radiation sensor will detect energetic particles  from the Van Allen belts. The satellite will sit in a low-Earth orbit and circle the globe every 90 minutes, some data will be transmitted in real time, but all of it is stored for later transmission.

Not only did the students have to come up with a design concept, write the code to run the device, and build the circuit board by hand, they also had to learn and become licensed ham radio operators as well.

The satellite that the students are using to launch into space is part of the CubeSat program — an initiative supported by NASA to help give students more hands-on experience with space research — and is being constructed by AMSAT, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, whose mission is to foster amateur radio participation in space technology. The data from a full day of operating the experiment will be transmitted from the satellite as it makes a single pass over the CubeSat tracking station on top of Van Allen Hall.

The final result will be a full mapping of the radiation levels at a low Earth orbit.

It is hoped the Fox CubeSat with an FM voice transponder will be launched later this year.

More information - http://now.uiowa.edu/2015/05/seniors-reenact-van-allen-radiation-belt-experiments

AMSAT-UK - http://amsat-uk.org/