An ionospheric monitoring service at home

Foundations of Amateur Radio

One of the more fundamental aspects of long distance radio communication is the impact of the ionosphere. Depending on how excited the Sun is, what time of day it is and what frequency you're using at the time will determine if the signal you're trying to hear from the other side of the planet makes it to you or is on its way to a radio amateur on Proxima B who is likely to hear this podcast in just over 4 years from now.

In other words, the ionosphere can act like a mirror to radio waves, or it can be all but invisible.

As luck would have it, this changes all the time. Much like waiting for the local weather bureau for the forecast for tomorrow's field-day, there are several services that provide ionospheric predictions. The Australian Space Weather Service, SWS, is one of those. You might have previously known it as the Ionospheric Prediction Service, but Space is much more buzz-word compliant, so SWS is the go.

If you're not a radio amateur, space weather can impact stuff here on Earth, like the ability to communicate, transfer energy across the electricity grid, use navigation systems and other life-essentials. The SWS offers alerts for aviation and several other non-amateur services.

If you're interested in HF communications, the SWS offers HF prediction tools that allow you to check what frequencies to use to communicate with particular locations using visualisations like the Hourly Area Prediction map.

If you're more of the Do-It-Yourself kind of person, you might be pleasantly surprised that you can have your very own ionospheric monitoring station at home. Not only that, it's probably already in place, configured and ready to go.

If you're using WSJT-X to monitor WSPR transmissions, then you'll have noticed that the screen shows all the stations you've been able to decode and you can scroll back as far as you like to the time when you launched WSJT-X.

If you want to do some analysis on that, copy and paste is an option, but it turns out that there's a handy little document being stored on your computer called ALL_WSPR.TXT that contains the very same data going back to when you installed and launched the first time.

This information represents what stations you heard, at what time and with what level of signal to noise at your shack, not some fancy station in the middle of nowhere with specialist hardware, your actual station, the one you use to talk to your friends, with your antenna, your power supply, the whole thing.

For my own entertainment I've been working on a way to visualise this. I created a map that shows the location every station I've logged, 30,000 of these reports in the past four months. It's interesting to see that I can hear most of the globe from my shack. Notably absent is South America but that is likely a combination of band selection and local noise.

In the meantime I've gone down another rabbit hole in figuring out if I can use an image file to visualise all this without needing fancy software, unless you consider a web-browser and bash fancy.

The idea being that a simple script could take the output from your station and convert that into a map you can see on your browser. In case you're wondering, I'm thinking that a style-sheet attached to a Scalable Vector Graphic or SVG might be just the ticket to showing just how many times I've heard a particular grid-square.

If you have ideas on what else you might do with this data, get in touch.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB