Episode 259 Phil Erickson W1PJE Transcript
Eric, 4Z1UG
This episode of QSO Today is sponsored by Icom America, makers of the finest HF V HF and U HF transceivers for the radio amateur,that are ready to enhance your contest season and by QRP Labs hands summer G0UPL’s radio kit company. Hands has an amazing catalog of radio kits and parts for every budget. I want to thank both Icom and QRP Labs for sponsoring the QSO Today podcast.
Welcome to the QSO Today podcast. I'm Eric Guth 4Z1UG, your host. Phil W1PJE sits on a million watt U HF transmitter at the MIT Haystack observatory where he studies the atmosphere and radio propagation. Phil is a longtime radio guy but a newcomer to amateur radio as you will hear in this QSO Today. The tools, modes and technology of amateur radio are complementing the research achievements of scientists like Phil, W1PJE. W1PJE, this is Eric 4Z1UG, are you there Phil?
Yes I am, Eric for 4Z1UG or 5 + 9 + 40 on this line. Good evening to you or afternoon here, and hello.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Yeah thanks Phil, thanks for joining me on the QSO Today podcast can we start at the beginning of your ham radio story? When and how did it start for you?
Phil W1PJE
Certainly there are a couple of different things that happened to get me interested in radio and in fact that's laid down the foundation for my whole career. On my mother's side of the family they came from Duchess County in New York, a little town called Millerton. Specifically, we would go down to visit my grandmother and my uncle who still runs a little, you know sundries and sporting goods store there which is celebrating 100 years this July. So our family's been doing this for a while and upstairs in the 3rd floor when I would visit, there was a Hallicrafters SX 110 that my uncle had gotten in trade for something or another, being a vacuum tube or a valve set. When you turned it on it glowed nicely and in the wintertime it certainly kept the room warm and being a person who was 11 or 12 at the time I disobeyed my grandmother's instructions and climbed out in the hip roof and installed a long wire antenna. When I would visit them especially on a hot summer evening just tuning around in the bands and listening to commercial broadcasters was sort of a and Monica couldn't beat the attraction especially tuning into things like Vatican Radio which would only spend 15 minutes a day speaking in English, get reading the news, hearing the little audio jingles like radio Australia would play Waltzing Matilda for five minutes on the frequency to let you know they were there and even more interesting I got in a bit of an illicit feeling tuning around and discovering the Voice of America. Even though as a US citizen I wasn't allowed to get a schedule. Turns out, I found out much later there's something called the Smith Mundt Act which said that as a US citizen listening to the Voice of America would be propaganda. So I was tuning across this thing but yet as a citizen I wasn't supposed to be listening to it. So that was interesting to me. So from there it gradually went down to a 1941 Zenith 10S567 Console that was down in my family's store which pretty sure heard the declaration that FDR made on December 7th 1941. This huge thing with an 18 inch speaker that you turned it on and that very warm sound came out of it. So I got some time repairing that. When I wasn't visiting them I was back home in Schenectady, New York where I grew up. Our street had a lot of technically capable people on it. My parents both worked for General Electric's research & development laboratory and so radio became a part of my bedroom and the thing I listened to. In fact we even detoured a family car trip to Canada at one point to visit the CBC transmit facilities in Sackville which I suppose was a little bit unusual for the typical family trip. That was because I had heard and that was also because I had tuned across the CBC North service which would click into in Inuktitut and Cree at some point and those languages are so amazing to listen to that once again I got the feeling that the world was opening up to me just by tuning around.
Phil W1PJE
One other thing that kind of cemented my interest in radio and all things radio is at the time a fellow named Glenn Hauser who is still around and now does the world of radio, I believe broadcast he had a journal called the Review of International Broadcasting. It was this little thing that came in a five by eight inch mega kind of typed up magazine and my parents got me a subscription for that because this was before the wide available the internet, this was the way you figured out where stations were going to be. Actually Glenn called our house. I remember this at one point sometime before the holidays, because my parents apparently were getting me the subscription. I picked up the phone and said “hello”. There was this pause in the line and someone said “I’d like to speak to your parents. Being a good person I said” can I ask who's calling” and there was this pause for a moment on the other end and then he said “Santa Claus” so the phone was handed to my father and they commenced the negotiations. You know listening to shortwaves was something that I did all through school. I never really got the transmitting until later mainly because there weren't necessarily a lot of hams right near me down the street for example and then very quickly as I got interested in physics and engineering and went into university, some of that took over sort of the impetus for technical work in constructing transmitters and as we'll talk about a little bit later I've ended up in a place with very loud transmitters. So in some sense I have been transmitting, it's just been in a little different way than the typical ham would have gotten interested I guess.
Eric 4Z1UG:
When did you get your first license and what was your first call-sign.
Phil W1PJE
Believe it or not, not at all, not until rather recently, I think I was licensed in 2015 because I figured it was finally time. Okay let's just go ahead and do this. Like I said I had been hanging around with amateurs for many, many years and the whole thing was triggered by my friend Skip Youngberg, who's a fellow in the Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club that I belong to. That’s K1NKR; he invited me to give a talk over at the club which is the neighbor to where I'm speaking to you from Haystack in 2013. That's kind of what started it all, so Skip was one of my first Elmers. Another Elmer that kind of appeared on the scene is my colleague Dr. Ethan Miller that's K8GU. Ethan is at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He's a colleague, a friend and a very longtime operator. Then like anything, when you start looking for amateur radio operators you find them everywhere especially in technical fields. So it turned out that one of the people is my colleague here Will Rogers KWD4FOV . Will has been a HS operator for many years, and then suddenly a fellow named Blue Spring Bruce Blaine K1BG, who was a very crack CW operator came over, helped me string an antenna and got me into doing some public outreach, in fact involving amateur radio. I've been very blessed to have these people show up and kind of get me started. After that through some activities that we'll talk about a little bit later I've been connected to people like Ward Silver whom I know you've had on the program and Carl Luetzelschwab, (K9LA QSO Today, Guest in episode 27). My colleague Bill..
Eric, 4Z1UG
Who I have also had …
Phil W1PJE
Yes indeed.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Yes indeed.
Phil W1PJE
You have made the rounds.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Well, a long time ago. Almost five years now.
Phil W1PJE
Yeah, well Carl's an extraordinary ham too, in that not only has he had all, he has all this extremely deep propagation knowledge but he also keeps up with the scientific literature quite well. Usually he's found out about something even before I have. So Carl is a wonderful collaborator and also my colleague Bill Wiles NQ6Z is also involved so I've been really blessed to have a number of people who have not only shown me the ropes just in my personal ability to become a full-fledged ham here but also in just the curiosity that I hope will be able to cover a little bit later oh sure it's okay.
Eric, 4Z1UG
So was your first call-sign W1PJE.
Phil W1PJE
In fact it was, and because that way my memory could remember who I was. That's a vanity call.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Did you go from zero to extra in one sitting?
Phil W1PJE
I did and I probably should have warned the examiner that I was going to do that. Because by the time I asked for the second piece of paper he was getting a little bit concerned, and then when I asked for this, the extra set of questions he was really confused so I should have warned him. But yes I did but because again and I by the way I am also trying to rectify the lack of requirement for a CW test by trying to get myself up to speed on that. Trying to stick the head copy so that's.
Eric, 4Z1UG
No, good for you and what's the method you're using for that?
Phil W1PJE
To tell you the truth, after learning sort of the basic letters really with a couple of mp3 files that I found on the web, I can't remember the fellow’s call who did that. Really the best thing for me has actually been just tuning around and listening to traffic. That's especially contests. Contests tend to be easier because the exchange is predefined and your brain starts to pick up patterns. I know that you interviewed someone who was talking about this Wordsworth method.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Right.
Phil W1PJE
… or not listening to just letters. But listen, that's entirely the way to go for me. Certainly whole word absolutely, and that's the way my brain works and that's the way I learned language so if anybody is thinking about embarking on a similar journey I really do recommend that method. It's a little tough going at first but then it's a nonlinear process. Suddenly your brain wakes up and starts, it's like when you buy a white car after a little while suddenly you see that everybody in the highway has white cars.
Eric, 4Z1UG That's exactly right. Yes or you see a kind of car.
Phil W1PJE
Yep, absolutely and that’s what I've been doing. I was going to say I should mention that if you think about the first things that I worked with and it's going to this Hallicrafters SX 110 that I mentioned. I eventually ended up with a national NC-125 which my father had found from someone for not very much money. This is a 1950’s receiver. It's not the best radio but it was something that I could work with and I had one of those Electrical Engineering sorts of early experiences. It turns out that on the back of that was an octal plug and because it was intended as an accessory chassis I think it was an FM chassis before they moved the FM frequencies up to 100 megahertz. The plug had a 150 volts DC and the full B+ supply on the back of it and at one point I actually came into contact with the B+ very briefly. That was enough to curl my hair. So early on I recognized the importance of keeping one hand behind your back so that was another thing that I got to work with.
Eric, 4Z1UG
I saw the picture of that in your QRZ page and it led me I wrote a question down here that I was just wondering whether you've acquired and restored other vintage gear?
Phil W1PJE
A little bit, mostly it's been trying to keep the NC 125 at least on the planet and then every so often going back to this Zenith 10S567 which is another beast in and of itself. It’s one of those things that originally had the unpolarized plug so if you've flipped the pull over, you flip the plug around, the entire chassis was hot . Yeah you have to be a little bit careful.
Eric, 4Z1UG
So you still have the Zenith 10s567?
Phil W1PJE
It in fact is operating as we speak and my uncle's stored in the ER for me.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Oh amazing.
Phil W1PJE
There's a little bit of a family story that goes with that too. We have a serious number of Anglophiles in our house and in fact in my family including my uncle and one of the things he really liked to do was to turn that on and tune into the Queen's message which comes out at 1600 GMT on Christmas Day. This is something that the Queen has done ever since her father George the sixth started in the 1930s. You know a message to the Commonwealth so we kept the radio running and unfortunately the BBC has stopped their shortwave service to North America ten or more years ago because they figured that everyone was getting this through satellite feeds now. But there are many holidays where at 10 a.m. on Christmas morning I had to interrupt the festivities to go down and get a tape recorder and record the message that I could bring it down when I visited him later so we could find out exactly what she had said. So there's a connection there
Eric, 4Z1UG
Did your interests in radio wave listening play a part in the choices that you made for your education in Korea?
Phil W1PJE
Absolutely, for undergraduate I ended up at Cornell University which is a very large University with a lot of different subjects. I ended up in the engineering school and I was a bit of a generalist .So I said “boy there's always interesting things: chemical engineering and mechanical engineering and civil engineering. How am I going to decide about all this stuff? I looked over and I said “Oh electrical engineering mm-hmm, okay play with radio parts, that sounds pretty cool”. So I ended up going through and getting my bachelor's in EE and then stayed on because that same department in graduate school was doing radar work. Instead of radars pointing at objects like airplanes, these were radars that pointed upwards at the upper atmosphere and tried to scatter off the electrons and ions that are up there. It's a natural outgrowth of being an EE; you know how to put signal processing together; you know how to put RF together; so one thing led to another. Ended up I decided I wanted to do research. So I ended up with a PhD from a space physics group but my background was in electrical engineering and that led to me becoming one of the researchers here at MIT Haystack Observatory, which is in Westford Massachusetts, a little north west of Boston. I can trace that whole path back to sitting there on a hot evening on that third floor and listening to Deutsche Veller or VOA or something else coming and going. I really see a direct line.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Well, what is the MIT Haystack observatory?
Phil W1PJE
Okay, so MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just to spell out all my acronyms. MIT of course is located in Cambridge Massachusetts which is much closer. In Boston post-war the famous MIT radiation laboratory which was instrumental in doing radar development in the 1930s and 1940s wanted to continue that kind of radar development. They didn't want to do large antennas and powerful transmitters in the city of Cambridge because it
was already of course quite crowded with people and so they ended up buying a plot of land out here. It’s about 50 kilometers or 35 miles northwest of Boston which at the time was a sleepy area. This is where people from Boston had their three season summer homes and they bought about 1300 acres of land or about three and a half square miles. Sorry for the English units. I should translate it into hectares at some point, and we're on top of a little hill and this was happening. In the mid-1950s Haystack Observatory was really started as a radar development site. The timing was very fortuitous because just as the site was being constructed and getting underway there were some developments for the ballistic missile early warning system. That’s the thing that looks over the Poles and the Cold War era but you needed a fairly loud transmitter and a fairly large antenna. As all this was just finishing its construction. Sputnik 1 was launched on October 4th 1957 and so it turned out that the site he arranged Sputnik 1 about two days after it was launched so we kind of provided an early indication that the satellite was at the altitude that it was at. As you know ham radio operators around the world were listening to its particular beeping but this was an actual ping that could tell them that yes, the orbit was about what the Soviets had claimed. So we kind of got on the map rather quickly. Radar development kind of started. This was at UHF frequencies which is 440 megahertz approximately.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Or in the neighborhood of the 70 cent.
Phil W1PJE
Yes, exactly in the neighborhood and then gradually quickly that went up to L band 12 of the 1290 1295 megahertz again not that far from an amateur band and then it went up to s and expand that's two point four two point something gigahertz depending X band is 10 gigahertz and then we've gone beyond that now. In fact one of the sensors here that is operated by MIT Lincoln Laboratory which is a piece of MIT that does DoD work, that sensor is up at W band that's 95 gigahertz as a radar. So with a large antenna at 95 gigahertz you have interesting things. So gradually this site as an observatory developed as a place to do advanced radio and radar development and about midway through its history maybe midway between the 50s and now somewhere in the early 1970s a program was created to do basic fundamental physical research. Not just applied research for things like Department of Defense and so the program that I work with and in fact Haystack is now administered by a department on MIT campus so we do work for the vice president for research. We do basic research funded by writing grants to places like National Science Foundation NASA Air Force Office of Scientific Research There are radio astronomers here at Haystack who don't make any waves but they listen to waves being emitted by celestial objects. There are people like me running a program where we would like to figure out what's going on in the charged part of the upper atmosphere but the charged part of the upper atmosphere doesn't necessarily transmit radio waves so we have to make our own so we use this UHF system leftover from that original development back in the 50s and in fact pointed straight up and getting a very faint echo from the ions and electrons that make up the upper atmosphere the same ones that create HF propagation that every amateur radio operator deals with from getting their signal from point A to point B. We do this and then use that as a fundamental research tool so that's some of the things that we do at Haystack. You could think of it as a Multi program place where we use radio waves for remote sensing in some form or another.
Eric, 4Z1UG
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Eric, 4Z1UG
Does Haystack collaborate with HARP which is the High Frequency
Active Aural Research Program in Alaska?
Phil W1PJE
HARP is part of sort of the general. We don't directly collaborate with HARP here but we certainly have colleagues that work with HARP more directly. So one thing to understand is that it's also interesting to think about. Well actually for the power levels that I need in order to get this very faint echo from the ionosphere and then interpret it to obtain , I'm kind of doing weather in the upper atmosphere, I'm looking for density and temperature and velocity and what the stuff is made of. I mean I do need about a megawatt class transmitter and a hundred and fifty foot or forty six meter diameter antenna and even with those things the signal that I get back is a few femto at sits. The signal noise ratio is about a three to five above the thermal noise floor like when just what the universe is putting out you might think wow when you turn that on that's a lot of power with a lot of gain. Don’t you do something to the atmosphere? So I did this calculation for a bunch of students once, and even with that power level it turns out that at the U HF frequencies I'm using; the Sun every day when it wakes up puts about a hundred million times more energy into the upper atmosphere than my paltry little efforts can. So at the frequencies I use nothing much happens, to be honest here. Now if you go down to HF frequencies which HARP can resonate with the upper atmosphere? There’s a different set of physics there and you can raise the temperature a little bit so people that work with HARP actually use that as an active experiment. We raise the temperature a couple of hundred degrees Kelvin and then you turn off the transmitter for a little bit and watch it relax and when you're doing that you're actually doing an active chemistry experiment where you're figuring out things like thermal conduction, things like how fast the ions crash into the neutrals. These are things you cannot measure in a laboratory. The upper atmosphere is a very different place. It is a place with very low pressure and very high temperature and you just can't make it in a laboratory vessel so these are so HARP does sort of active experiments to perturb the honest fear in very small ways and see what happens. We are just doing diagnostics, so we are just measuring the normal thermal state of what's going on here. But to do it we need something that's really large.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Now you mentioned that that the array that you're using was left over from the radar work. Is the one megawatt radar transmitter which is talked about on the HARP, I'm sorry on the M on the Haystack Observatory website? Is that transmitter also World War Two Vintage?
Phil W1PJE
It turns out that I used the same transmitter that tracked Sputnik one in 1957. High power is high power. I'm not using the same transmitting tube. We use something called a klystron which may be familiar to some of your listeners. That's basically a tuned microwave cavity amplifier. It's got four cavities tuned to 440 megahertz. This was used in high-power radar work for these larger arrays that would put many of them together and again look for objects coming over the horizon and coming out of the atmosphere. The cabinet I use is in fact the very same one. We've gone through a number of klystron since then. You start with an electron beam. The bottom of the electron beam comes out of the filament and again anybody who has worked with a vacuum tube will recognize the filament boiling off electrons. It goes through this tube with a bunch of electro magnetics to pinch the beam and then as it passes each one of these four cavities the electrons stop becoming completely laminar or smooth and they become bunched and they bunch at the frequency that we'd like to transmit at. At one point we inject the signal that we'd like to, sort of modulate it at and then eventually the beam comes out. It appears at the top. After four cavities there's an output coupler which then pulls off it’s now megawatt class wave. We've pulled energy out of the power supply essentially and used it to amplify this wave .The rest of the electrons crash into a collector plate again, looks like a plate and then go back to the power supply and complete the picture. It's a very clever technology that goes back to the Varian brothers and also Charlie Litton. In fact if you go back in the history of amateur radio you will find those names in the 30s and the 40s. Once again like many things if you look hard enough you find amateur radio operators innovating all over the place and they was certainly people who did it on the West Coast.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Now I was looking through the MIT Haystack Observatory website and there was a page for undergraduate students, and it said that undergraduate students are encouraged to buy and build an SRT or a small radio telescope. I looked at the Bill of Materials. It looked like you could put together one of these things for about eight thousand dollars.
Phil W1PJE
It would be useful for amateur radio operators as the small radio telescope was developed by my brilliant colleague Alan Rogers who was a very distinguished radio astronomer but he actually had a background. He grew up in South Africa and wanted to make sure that there were affordable instruments to be able to do radio astronomy rather than the million dollar class telescopes that you might expect from looking at normal facilities so the SRT started life then .It's essentially a combination of an older sort of three meter to point something meter class antenna that people used to use for satellite TV reception.
Eric Guth 4Z1UG:
Right, see band satellite TV.
Phil W1PJE
Yeah, that's right and it's primarily tuned to frequencies. The feed that is used is primarily tuned down in the Elven region because he's looking for the actual, turns out that neutral hydrogen in the universe emits a faint signal when the hydrogen transitions from one state to another one and that signal is about 1.4 gigahertz-ish and so the idea is that with this particular system it's sensitive enough to actually measure the rotation curve of the neutral hydrogen in our galaxy measured over a long time, which is one of the fundamental things that you do for radio astronomy. The SRT was developed to do that sort of thing and there's a couple of hundred of them maybe more than that installed in various universities. You've already found the Bill of Materials so you can see what that system is. He then later developed something called the V SRT which is the very small radio telescope which in fact uses DirecTV dishes because you can buy them on eBay for nothing. You can get not only those you can also buy a very nice low noise quad band, a low-noise block feed because there's these triple block feeds that you will see on a typical DirectTV's condition so he's converted the V SRT to do some other measurements. I would say from an amateur radio point of view. the design is fairly malleable and shifting that down to frequencies that someone might be interested in say an L band or some of the higher frequencies with the V SRT is not out of the question. That would be an interesting exercise for someone to try to do that. Certainly they can contact me and I will forward that information to our team here, we're always looking for new people to sort of innovate on the SRT and the V SRT. They're interesting tools, the explosion in affordable sampler is of course no surprise to your listeners. It still continuously astonishes me what you can get now for almost no money. In fact the RTL dongles the kinds of things that I know are some people's first foray into software-defined radio. One of Alan's systems here is actually using that as its sampling so it's very possible to do very good science with something that on the face of it looks like, geez this thing is so cheap, how can this really do work? I would say, Eric, that is one message that I really should leave listeners with. In general when they're listening to this is that, that explosion of technology of making things affordable at both the hardware and the software level at a level that was unimaginative opportunities for people in that making measurements that are not professionally calibrated but making a lot of them through things like machine learning, AI techniques and other things you can often extract science. If you have enough measurements on devices that are not very well calibrated, they are not taken into a laboratory and shown a calibrated power source and precisely measured. That is one thing that we in the professional community are trying to work with as a new data source as something that has a lot of science in it. But is not the traditional way that we would field for example a professional series of instruments. Let me talk a little bit later about this thing called ham saw that I've been quite involved in. I think that's something to bear in mind.
Eric Guth, 4Z1UG
Is there a relationship or do you think that because of what you've just said in terms of the availability of technology I might even say that our ability to maybe even crowdsource around the world through internet connections. receivers and transmitters and things like this. Is there a relationship between ham radio operators and space physicists that could create a relationship that would benefit both physicists and ham radio operators and how would you define that?
Phil W1PJE
I would say the answer to the first question is absolutely and that's why we've started this collective. My colleague Nathaniel Frizzell W2NAF, who is a researcher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, soon on his way to the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. Nathaniel has been quite visionary three or four years ago in realizing that we needed to address precisely the question that you asked as your last question. How can we make science out of these measurements? How can we make amateurs and professionals meet in the middle? The ham psych elective was sort of started as a way to get that dialogue going and what we have realized over the last two or three years is there's a couple of keys to making the crowdsourcing of enthusiasts kind of measurements, yield real science. The first one is to just to figure out how to motivate the scientific method and the rigors that you have to go through to a technically literate population who is primarily trying to enjoy this as a hobby. If I told you, I'd love for you to make the scientific measurement but I'm going to need to tie up your IC 7300 for one year continuously and you can't touch it. We'll make these really great measurements. That's not as motivating as basically saying if you get on the radio and you make some FT8 Digital contacts and you make sure that they're uploaded to PSK reporter we can use that information. Furthermore if we talk back and forth we can show you how we're using that information which will motivate more people to get involved because we quickly realized that just doing things in a vacuum and seeing no response to it is not that motivating. So what we're doing in this ham side collective and this is some of the things I've been involved with this is trying to come in from the professional side and say how do we use this data and from the amateur side coming in and saying okay we're really enthusiastic we want to contribute to science. How should we contribute? We're trying to meet in the middle and we've had some good initial successes but it's definitely a developing collaborative.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Let me take a quick break here to tell you about my favorite amateur radio audio podcast, the Ham Radio Workbench podcast with George KG6VU and Jeremy KF71J where they pursue topics, technology and projects on their ham radio workbenches every two weeks. George and Jeremy document their projects and make circuit boards available for sale to their listeners. They have interesting guests and go in deep. Even if you are a seasoned ham radio builder or just getting started be sure to join George and Jeremy for the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. Use the link on this week's show notes page by clicking on the image. And now back to our QSO Today.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Apparently there was a Ham Psy workshop last May. You may have heard a lecture called IOnTV using WWV timing reference signals to observe honest farik variation? Do you have any comments on the potential demise of WWV and how it might impact your research and amateur radio in general?
Phil W1PJE
I do, WWV is an excellent example of something I would call an asymmetric measurement or an asymmetric opportunity. I will give you one example. The GPS cluster has been revolutionary for people navigating from point A to point B. I mean it's just transformed our lives. It's in nearly every device I can think of that needs to know where you are or where you're going. GPS is a wonderful example of an asymmetric system where almost all the money is spent by an agency. In this case that caused the US to put satellites up to maintain their clocks, to do everything necessary to calibrate that end so that you can go get your $2 chip from some manufacturer and you can receive these signals and get navigation information. It turns out by the way that has dianna spheric information buried in it that we actually use that as a research tool. The community's been doing that for about 20 years. Actually getting back to WWV. WWV has the same flavor the people of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in the U.S. Their primary goal is to maintain accurate time and frequency standards and so long before the internet WWV my colleagues tell me was in fact the way that they would they would synchronize their professional instruments. For those people who know about network time protocol if you look which normally people use GPS receivers now to set a stratum one and TP server and then you synchronize your computer off that, if you look in the protocol there is actually still a slot that describes how you would use a WWV receiver to distribute time because at one point that's what people used. That is a reliable measurement .The frequency is really locked. It’s very stable and so one of the things that I did and the lecture you're talking about was trying to figure out okay if I know that there's this very stable thing and I just have a regular amateur grade receiver or even a software-defined receiver or maybe even when I don't even have on my desk but I can get to through the web. There are these things called web FDR's, Kiwi SDRs that are available that you can actually pull the WWV clock signal off of. Could I figure out something scientifically about the atmosphere by listening to WWV on a long path? Something that I knew had propagated at HF 5 10 megahertz, 10 megahertz, 15 megahertz from the station in Fort Collins Colorado to me. Turns out that there is, I'm pretty sure that if you just look at what the difference is in the arrival of a second tick. You ever listened to WWV that's one of like the first signals that anyone who touches a radio listens to. You will hear a low thump thump and that's a 100 Hertz subcarrier that happens every single second with a defined edge. All I did was take a look at those edges and measure the difference between one tick to the next. If you take that data near the WWD transmitter they're very very tightly packed. If you take them on an ionospheric path they're actually spread meaning that there's micro fluctuations in the path between you and the transmitter that must have been caused by the ionosphere. For me having WWV there is a wonderful opportunity to get a very low-cost yet distributed ionospheric monitor that would be very easy for people to participate in. All you need is an am capable receiver. They transmit am double sideband with a carrier. I think it's important not to throw what looks like old technology out with the bathwater and so we've made that we have also added our voice to those people in the US that are basically arguing for not turning WDV off but keeping it on. There's a similar time signal of course in Canada CHU but it's a little differently formatted. The one at WWD is a little better for this purpose so I certainly hope that WWE continues. I did watch the budget negotiations this year rather carefully and it appears at the last moment that WWE was taken off the table but that certainly does not mean that it might not go back on. We're hoping that that continues and we'll do our best to add our voice to it.
Eric, 4Z1UG
There was something in the news probably in the last month or two about potential issues with GPS and that GPS could go out. As I had mentioned to you before we started that even cranes on loading docks in seaports use GPS to be able to move containers from one side of the port to the other.
Do you see any issues with that GPS and what would the implications be for space science?
Phil W1PJE
GPS indeed is used just as you said; for precise navigation along inland waterways. One application of GPS that people also don't necessarily understand is that the primary goal of GPS is not to give navigation signals. It's actually to distribute time. The fact that it distributes an accurate time means that you can measure the delay along the path from your ground station to the satellite and if you measure more than four of them you can localize yourself on a sphere. So wide global coordinated time distribution is the key factor that keeps GPS going. Now if you have radio interference, that kind of nestles up to those areas or if you have for example even natural processes like scintillation, these are little embedded irregularities that happen in the ionosphere that frankly we don't completely understand yet. We've been working at it for a while. Those have impacts on precise GPS navigation. The applications community is working hard to try to understand them but ultimately it all does come back to understanding our environment. This is understanding the weather in space, understanding natural ionospheric variability and how that might affect GPS so I'd say there are two answers there. The first one is that we need to understand the natural environment better, that our signals are passing through from satellite to ground. But the second thing is also to keep them interference free and that's of course a very familiar topic for anybody who is enjoying what I liked Steve Bible who I know you interviewed just recently. Steve used a really good phrase when he said “the amateur allocations are sort of the national parks and we need to make sure that the national parks remain enjoyable by everyone”. There are intense commercial pressures now to encroach into the national parks and the amateur radio community can help through things like the International Amateur Radio Union to sort of head off some of that encroachment and keep the bands open for advancement of the radio art. I think the GPS bands are no less a place that that applies to.
Eric, 4Z1UG Do you also use amateur radio beacons various bands for looking at propagation and how it may work? Are you using all kinds of different technologies in order to determine what the bands are looking like?
Phil W1PJE
Yes we do. In fact there's an entire sort of branch of study. It's called Pat.
Some people call it passive radar. If you come from the applications world you're here it called signals of opportunity. What that is, is can you make a remote sensor when you don't control the transmitter? When the transmitter is doing whatever it's doing, can you somehow extract information from that? A beacon is a wonderful signal because for a good amount of its transmission, usually for long blocks it’s unmodulated. It's just a CW tone, so if you see any spectral spreading or anything else on that when you receive it somewhere else the medium in between you and it must have caused that. Beacons are wonderful. I have a colleague up at Dartmouth who actually a college in New Hampshire here in the US who has been for several years trying to use commercial AM radio stations because what is am? It's a constant carrier with side bands and watching a Down at 1 megahertz so this is below 160 meters this is getting to the new 630 meter band kind of somewhere in the middle, watching fluctuations in the carrier to again attempt to determine ionospheric information. So kind of trying to back out what the medium must have been doing to cause these fluctuations. HF beacons same way right on up through the spectrum and I know that the International beacon community is that what's happening really is that the professional community is beginning to wake up and say wow, there's all of these signals out there some of which have more interesting qualities than others. We can use all of it and what if we try to use most of it together rather than individually looking at a particular beacon? What if we can sort of aggregate what's going on? That's been some of the early work we've done at Ham sigh and the papers that Dr. Frizzell and other people have published in peer-reviewed journals have been using this collective set to try to do that science with whatever we can find. You can use any data you can find as long as you can understand what uncertainties it has. What you do and do not, what you are and are not able to measure and so yes I would say that beacons are a great source of that. Whether they're by the way on orbiting satellites or whether they are on the ground.
Eric 41UZG
If you're using beacons do you happen to have to know the power output or the effective radiated power from the antenna on that beacon and the kind of antenna? I mean in order for the data to be really valuable would you have to standardize on the transmitting set of beacons across the world? An example I might give you; as I'm sure you know soda beams in the UK make a little Milla watt whisper light transmitter which is used for testing antennas. Interestingly enough it works on whisper net and so therefore if you had a standard say vertical antenna on 40 meters, could a flock of those across the world for lack of a better word, a whole bunch of them across the world could that give you really valuable information?
Phil W1PJE
Yes it could. I'd say that we are on level one of using the information we have. Essentially the initial studies that people have done through the ham side collective and other related efforts, the only thing one trusts is that there was a path open between point A and point B. One so far because we don't know necessarily what the calibrated power is. We don't know what the antenna pattern is; but we know that something was open between A and B. But the collective source of all of those paths and how they change and anyone who has looked at whisper Nets Maps or PSK Reporters Maps can see this. There is information that you understand by just understanding what's open. I would say that that's level two and this is the work that Ham Psy is now engaged in in collaboration with Tapper and I know that you have just talked to Steve Bible not that long ago. The idea is can we go farther? Can we get some kind of reference antenna which as you said is calibrated somewhat, as you're talking about? Can we get an SDR a software-defined radio that is a little purpose-built for these kinds of measurements and can we put it together in an affordable enough package that we can start building the networks to go to I would say level two where one does have some calibrated things. One has calibrated power; one has a calibrated antenna pattern. One makes measurements including for example beacon quality measurements on different Cadence's so that's the discussion that we're engaged in right now. I think the future is quite bright for that but it's a little early days to see exactly how that's going to settle.
Eric, 4Z1UG
I noticed from your QRZ page that you have a recent entry where you now have one of Pavel Demin’s 8 band FT8 receivers using the Red Pitaya. Can you explain what that is and what you're learning from it?
Phil W1PJE
I will and by the way, that research started by listening to your interview with Rich Zwirko K1HTV on this very program. So perhaps the loop has closed there.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Well thank you that's good to know.
Phil W1PJE
Hey, you know the information was wonderful and I had worked with Pavel before. Kind of helping to test some early versions of his software with the Red Pitaya but I had not understood that he had this particular decoder. So just very basically. What it is, those people who have been paying any attention at all did the digital revolution know that the popularity of the FT 8 mode that F is for Frank and the T is for Taylor that's the Frank and Joe Taylor and the 8 happens to do with a number of frequencies that are being transmitted.
This is an extremely sophisticated weak signal coding that transmission that allows one to pull signals out well below the noise floor of most of the traditional modulation patterns like CW am single sideband, that sort of thing and as one knows it's been widely adopted by a bunch of people especially here at solar minimum where you know things like 10 meters and 12 meters don't open to traditional stuff that often and where the propagation for conventional things can be a little bit dismal. So Pavel wrote essentially this Red Pitaya is essentially a general-purpose device. The word was the Swiss Army knife for engineers. It’s a little board that essentially runs a form of embedded Linux and it has two receiver inputs and two transmitter outputs. Pertinent to this conversation one of the receiver outputs goes through an op-amp and straight into a floating point gate array or FPGA which is very programmable and can do things rather fast. So Pavel designed a little program which essentially divided the FPGA up into eight identical receiver slices much for that receiver slice should be familiar to anyone whose worked with a flex radio. They will develop, you can have four receiver slices and they can be tuned to different frequencies. So Pavel created this little image which essentially has eight receiver slices and you can set your choice of eight bands so you set the eight receiver slices to each of eight ft ,8 watering holes you know 14.0 7 4 megahertz for 20 meters 7.07 4 megahertz for 40 meters and so on and it sits there and takes data for 15 seconds and then engages its little decoder, decodes the signals. It records all of the information that comes out of the FT8 algorithm and then just uploads it to PSK reporter and it does this over and over again. That's its job. If you plug it into a little Ethernet port and apply power it starts doing this. So I thought; oh well, that's attractive. It's interesting ,let's just sees how many things it sees if I do that. I went home and hooked it up to my little router on my home network and took the fan dipole in the backyard. My friend Will put that together of course and I wasn't using it an 80 40 and 20 meter dipole three wires through that on there and I have to say the next morning when I woke up and I look at the statistics I could hardly believe what I saw. I kept that running for about a day and in a day I had over 20,000 decodes from about a hundred and twenty-five countries.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Did you see activity in all eight pins?
Phil W1PJE
Yes, I did. Well including the higher ones at absolute minimum from a nothing with very much gain and it's been continuing with that the whole time and these are propagation paths to Europe, to South America, to Australia, to New Zealand. I took some of the data from Phillip Gladstone's wonderful work with PS or Kay reporter, did a little bit of bidding on it. Made some maps and every day like clockwork I can see Japan light up for about two hours when gray line propagation happens and going and it goes away after that. If you would, if you are interested, if you're a curious person and you're interested in learning how propagation works at your QTH on your antenna I cannot recommend that thing highly enough. It's truly amazing. From a professional point of view what I find extremely interesting is that a lot of those paths are not really reproduced by the current electron density models or the best propagation software. So by contributing that literally just measure FT8 with a little device that you don't even touch, disconnecting of course if you're transmitting if you just do that you're generating a lot of data that it's going to take the professional community some time to even catch up. So another really exciting thing I think and I kind of just stumbled into it as any what any citizen scientist would do, oh that looks interesting I'll just plug it in and see what happens.
Eric, 4Z1UG
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Eric, 4Z1UG
Well, you know I hate to ask the question to a guy that's sitting on a million watt transmitter but do you think that the weak signal propagation is as interesting as the high power signal stuff that you've been doing in Haystack?
Phil W1PJE
Absolutely. I think that you know I spent my professional life here with, as you say a megawatt class pulsed system which I tell people is QRO and then you can add three or four ohs I guess. But no the weak signal stuff is equally as fascinating to me because it's uncovering features of even the quiet time, relatively low density ionosphere that I had not suspected at all or there. I have some professional colleagues who also sort of scratch their heads and saying well empirically I know they're there, I have yet to figure out why? RF propagation and we get spoiled at least superficially by going to things like The Voice of America, the VOA cap website. There's one of those that you can search which you know will give you propagation predictions for your location. It was developed by the Voice of America originally, and that code is lovely but it's a very heavily averaged code; and these particular weak signal paths are kind of at the forefront of what we understand or don't understand about the weather in the upper atmosphere. I'm very interested in just from a both an amateur and a professional point of view in seeing what we can figure out about this. One other thing to mention about that, that I was really shocked by, was going to the PSK Reporter dot info website which Philip Gladstone maintains and if you go look at a map and you know make any plot you'd like. At the bottom of that, in the lower left-hand corner there's a little link that says statistics and if you go to statistics you get another page that opens up which will show you a bunch of fascinating curves about how many stations were on over the last few days or week or two weeks and then there's a sort of a top ten list or a top something list of how many people had decoded things in 24 hours. But if you go down to the page at the bottom there is the number of FT8 reports that had happened over the last two hours and FT8 has two orders of magnitude more detections than any other mode. I mean it isn't even close. So just the number of people that are out there transmitting making contacts, this is an absolute goldmine for people who are doing on a circuit research. I'm really excited about it just from that point of view alone.
Eric, 4Z1UG
It leads you to believe then or leads me to believe then, that those paths that all around the world from my QTH are there all the time regardless of whether the sunspot cycle is that it's high or that it's low but depending upon the density of the atmosphere that our ability to operate conventional modes like single soybean and CW are impaired maybe by the low sunspot cycle.
Phil W1PJE
Precisely. That's the way I look at it. That's exactly the way I look at it. I also will point out that by literally downloading WXJTX and making some FT8 contacts if you wish to go deeper you are using weak signal communication codes that are absolutely the cutting edge. I mean there is nothing in the professional literature that works significantly better than the work that Joe Taylor and Steve Frank have put in there. These are extraordinary things, so I know that the typical ham when they look at that, initially you know it doesn't have the human factor of picking up the microphone and making of that contact and hearing that human voice. But if you are at all technically inclined these are the best that it gets. I think that what happens is that by using those codes and as you probably know the whole WSJTX team is still innovating . In fact, my inbox ping this morning with the fact that they are now releasing 2.1.0 which has the FT for mode in it which is even faster than FT8. My point is that by participating in this you are also doing communications weak signal research. Again by participating and uploading your data and sharing it with the community. This is a very different time than we have been experiencing even if you even a few years beforehand but it's not to say that people can enjoy the conventional context that they've always made on CW or even our side band or even a.m. It’s just that now you have so much more information about when to do it. When is going to be best from where you are and if you're a limited time person say you have a family and you're trying to maximize your hour or two that you have at the radio engaging your curiosity and looking at that data and figuring out when I would actually be able to do that is going to get you a lot farther. It’s just a wonderful set of tools we have.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Tapper has a project called the tangerine space SDR and you have some interests in it. What is that? What is the tangerine space SDR?
Phil W1PJE
The tangerine SDR grew out of some discussions that we had had at the last September in 2018 at the tapper workshop heard in Albuquerque. The Sunday morning discussion is usually a long-form one that takes the whole morning and goes on a deep dive into a particular topic. So members of the Ham Psi collective came along and we gave an introduction to what we were interested in from a professional ionospheric research point of view and then asked Tapper: Since you make devices ,very clever devices that then you can put into limited production, would it be possible to make an SDR software-defined radio that would in fact be tuned to generate a little more specific data that could be used for scientific purposes while it instills at the same time providing the handle installs it with some local information kind of similar to that FT8 monitor that I just talked about? Oh how are things doing at my QTH, how can I improve my setup? Am I having a problem hearing the west coast of the US where other people can hear it for example at the same time. So when we had this discussion the Tapper folks who are excellent at making things, going through the formal design process and then hardening a product that they can offer in limited quantities came up with the tangerine SDR as a way to sort of coalesce the discussion and the design process on an SDR that would for example be able to make some more calibrated measurements. That would have more precise timing than was available. For example, somehow involving some kind of a GPS discipline oscillators so that there is an accurate frequency reference, there is a way to determine accurate global time by pulling Universal time off the GPS cluster. So the Tangerine SDR is sort of in that cycling process right now. There's some mailing lists people are quite actively participating in .I expect to have more discussions with Tapper at the upcoming September meeting and if you go through the Ham Psy website at Hampsy. org there is some information in there on what people are now calling the personal space weather station. That's again a way for him to have something that both makes advanced scientific contributions and also does something that advances their own enjoyment of the hobby and it's a balance. But we're hoping that we can get there so that's where it’s at and I think the tangerine FDR name came from some way to make a catchy thing that would stick in someone's mind. Which I think it has already.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Right reminds me of a song and of course a link to this and to everything else that we're discussing is in the show notes of the QSO Today website. I said to throw a monkey wrench into this I never want to be political in the QSO Today podcast but you know when I have a guy like you as a guest it seems to me that I can ask some questions that might be a little bit out there. Does your work in the upper atmosphere lead you to conclude that perhaps man is responsible for climate change and is there anything that we can do about it?
Phil W1PJE
So my response to that would be that the work that we do at Haystack has revealed that we need to be much more, how shall I say this? Global in our understanding of the atmosphere to understand both the natural and the man-made effects. I have colleagues for example who study long-term trends. If you make the same kind of measurement in the upper atmosphere for 50 years; you have a fairly good baseline and some of the signals there of longer-term trends are larger amplitude than they are in looking at a bunch of thermometers here on the ground. Which would make some sense
If you think about it there's a lot of atmosphere on the ground. If you put a given amount of energy into the atmosphere more particles means smaller temperature changes. If you go up in the upper atmosphere less density, larger changes because the density times the temperature is this sort of measure of the energy in a box of atmosphere. I have colleagues who have been looking at our trends you know over the last 50 years and they do detect temperature changes but we're trying to understand those because those are actually coupled to the fact that the atmosphere is not a stationary thing. We know every day when we go out there if there's a storm front coming. There's a lot of wind blowing in our face. It turns out there are motions all over the place in the atmosphere and some of the motions are not only blowing horizontally but also vertically and so they're actually cupping coupling waves that come from the lower atmosphere into the upper atmosphere. So there's actually a form of weather in the upper atmosphere that comes from the ground not only from outside and the Sun and you hear about things like solar flares and coronal mass ejections which cause geomagnetic storms which don't really thrill people trying to make HF contacts. But my point here is that we are still trying to wrap our arms around the fact that we understand the whole atmosphere kind of from Sun to mud is the phrase I heard and so until we understand that, it's a little difficult to see if there's anything specific that we can do. Partly because our coupled models are still trying to catch up to our observations in terms of understanding the consequences of you know doubling CO2 and that sort of thing. So I would say that the researchers basically told me that life is a complicated thing and the upper atmospheres and the lower atmosphere is a very complicated thing. It's a little hard to answer that question. I will tell you though, that I am fully convinced that there are definitely anthropomorphic changes that humans are making in this particular system and that's a large experiment that it might not be wise to continue because we don't necessarily know the outcome and some of the outcomes are rather dire, so there's a connected point here. We were talking about the ability for amateurs and professionals to meet in the middle and one of the things that we scientists spend our entire days trying to convince ourselves of, is that we didn't do something wrong. Okay the rejecting the null hypothesis is the first thing you ever do in any scientific measurement which is essentially just to make to reject the likely probability that the two things that you're trying to think they have a connection to are not connected. That takes a lot of work and that's part of the reason why we have peer-reviewed papers, that sort of thing. The dialogue about how do we think we can in fact advance science but what we have to do is think about how to not do the what people call post hoc analysis which is essentially to say my dog barked and then there was an earthquake. Therefore my dog barking is a precursor to the earthquake. Well, we haven't quite figured out the number of times your dog barked and there was no earthquake. There's a wonderful website which I recommend everybody try to find through Google. It's called spurious correlations. It's a person that tries to illustrate the point that correlation is not causation. Just because two things are perfectly correlated doesn't mean one causes the other and this fellow who does this website has come up with some spectacular ones. I'll just give you the title of one of them; I have on my screen now which is the divorce rate in Maine perfectly correlates with the per capita consumption of margarine. These are two things that have absolutely no relation to one yet they are in fact perfectly correlated. Over more than a decade if you just take that correlation and say that well you know if I eat less margarine I won't get divorced, well, okay, that's pretty silly. But it's very easy in science to do the same thing. So that's one of the things that we're trying to do in the amateur professional connection, is try to understand how to not fall into those traps and also by inference how to train more people who are coming to this with curiosity and for fun. About how to do the more rigorous thing with the caveat that hey we're professionals and we know how to do this. We know how to get stuff in journals so let's work together.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Well it reminds me of in the 70s when there was a physicist at UC Irvine who was talking about the problem of fluorocarbons in the atmosphere and causing the hole in the ozone layer and so the way that in that industry and society adapted was to take the fluorocarbons out of spray cans for example, I don't know that meant that the ozone layer or the hole in the ozone layer was now healed because we're no longer spraying underarm deodorant. We’re using a solid or stick.
Phil W1PJE
I was going to say well what that means is that we stopped putting a source into the system and so what we now do is we now try to say well where was that source going? What were the circulation patterns? Is a hole still there but it's migrated somewhere else or how long do we predict that the system will take to recover to a nominal level but its prediction. There are some predictions that are very solid and there are some predictions that you just don't have enough data yet. I think it's very solid that anthropomorphic change is happening. Ok, there’s really no question through many different kinds of thing. The ability to predict in every detail what will happen is probably more difficult but I think there are certain basic conclusions that we can come to. The weather is going to get more variable. There's kind of no two ways around that most of the models show you that dealing with the extremes of variability is going to become an increasing societal problem and I think the last two years or three years just watching the normal weather patterns you're beginning to see that.
Eric, 4Z1UG
You know for a lot of different reasons we industry science people we tend to adapt and adjust in order to prevent something catastrophic. We heard the message of M fluorocarbons and we were able to practically eliminate them from air conditioning systems and spray cans. Yeah I think I think we have that we have that ability also When it comes to reducing CO2 there's a climate change leading to changes in radio propagation. Do you think?
Phil W1PJE
One of the complications of climate change is that the atmosphere actually reacts with different profiles? Different temperature changes at different levels so we talked about global warming. That's in the very lower atmosphere and as you go up in altitude there's a place where global cooling occurs near the mesosphere. The temperatures actually start getting colder and then above that the temperatures get hotter. Then they get colder and there are actually different levels, that’s because the amount of wave activity in the atmosphere transferring energy from one place to another one is very different at different altitudes. So another reason why the response to the system is very complex. Now if we're talking about the part of the atmosphere that does the HF propagation that we use as amateurs that's starting at about 90 to 100 kilometers altitude where the electron density is sufficiently dense to have an effect on propagation. Going up from there it certainly does have an effect the mean altitude of say the f electron density peak which is the place that does some of for example especially at night time trans I know transcontinental propagation is there's no II region anymore. The chemistry has sort of made it go away. About an hour after the Sun turns off you're left with the F region that layer and that altitude is going to determine sort of the refraction points and therefore the distance between A and B that layer is changing because the temperature in the upper atmosphere is in fact changing. So over a long term yes, it will have some effect projecting that into actual propagation paths is a work in progress but it did there's definitely going to be some kind of effect in there which if you're an interested science person you can study. If you're an interested person who wants to just get on with it and use the link; you need to abstract that science and say well what does it mean for me?
Eric, 4Z1UG
Do you have an opinion on what the greatest challenges facing amateur radio now?
Phil W1PJE
I would say that, right now, that wonderful piece of technology that I mentioned before that's generating really innovative software really an innovative hardware can get ahead of the ham that hasn't necessarily been keeping up with this furious pace of innovation for any a number of reasons. Maybe again they're in the middle of their career. They have a family or they just have missed some of it. I think re-education even of the folks who have been there for a while to understand some of these possibilities to understand that we can raise all boats by essentially trying to get everybody in a more level playing field, I think is a challenge that I believe would also address some of the inevitable. That's not the way we used to do it. Sort of responses that you get from people who have been around for a while and are feeling comfortable using a particular mode. This is long before my time but my understanding is for example that single-sideband at one point was looked at as well we just use am. Why do we need the single-sideband thing? Any new technology such as digital modes is inevitably going to run into this; but I think that it just means that we need to do more education. We need to talk on more programs like this one. We need to get people to understand that it's an and not an or.
Eric, 4Z1UG
What excites you the most about what's happening in amateur radio now?
Phil W1PJE
In addition to all the stuff I've just mentioned ; weak signal propagation; the science those data contain amateur scientists partnerships’ the technology available at pennies on the dollar. The other thing that I think is really exciting is the number of learning resources out there on YouTube. For example, I mean, I think you've had Alan Wolf WAW on people like Paul Carlson with Mr. Carlson's lab which has an enormous following. There's a lot of seriously good material out there that's wonderful and even for somebody like me who's going back to refresh his memory after a little while on certain subjects has been tremendous. That's really exciting to me.
Eric, 4Z1UG
It's an amazing time to be a ham radio operator I think. As a new ham, do you have advice that you'd give to new hams?
Phil W1PJE
Sure, one of the things that I find so extraordinary and fun, frankly about ham, radio is; it's populated with a bunch of people who are curious. Okay. And they're also extremely keen observers of what's going on because how can you participate in the hobby if you don't pay attention to what works and what doesn't? So feeding your curiosity and engaging in lifelong learning that is that as a key phrase is probably the most important thing I could encourage even a new ham to do. It may look intimidating at the beginning. There's all these subjects how could I possibly, I can't absorb all this. You don't have to absorb all of it. Pick one of them and socialize.
Go find a club, go find an Elmer, go find somebody, even online who can write. Drop them an email, write them a tweet. Ask them a question and when you're doing that when you've gotten yourself up a little bit with so you watch, you understand some of what you're doing, turn around and teach it to somebody else. The best way for you to understand what you're doing is to teach it to somebody else. Does that at the local level show up in your club and say “hey, I’ve been playing with this FT8 monitor thing. Let's just talk about it. I'll show you how it works. Does anybody recognize anything in here and contribute your observations to things like am sight, to things like other organized efforts and make it a collective pursuit. I think that’s the most important thing is to not sort of be isolated about it but to plug yourself into the community and it will give you back much more than you ever thought at the beginning.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Well, Phil I'm so grateful and excited that you agreed to be my guest on the QSO Today podcast. I want to mention to the listeners that in terms of finding a mentor, a ham radio mentor, you just listened to the two hundred and fifty ninth ham radio mentor on the QSO Today podcast and almost all of them with the exception of those who are now silent key almost all of the of the previous guests of the USO today podcast are available and anxious to hear from you. If you have questions about anything that you can learn in ham radio. So Phil I want to thank you so much for coming on the QSO Today podcast and with that I want to issue 73.
Phil W1PJE
It's been my real honor. I've enjoyed your podcast very much and it's been a lot of fun talking about things that excite me. So it's been a fabulous QSO . Thank you again very much Eric and 73 to you and all the listeners.
Eric, 4Z1UG
Thanks so much Phil. 73.
That concludes this episode of QSO Today. I hope that you enjoyed this QSO with Phil. Please be sure to check out the show notes that include links and information about the topics that we discussed. Go to WWW QSO Today and put in , W1PJE in the search box at the top of the page.
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Until next time this is Eric 41UZG 73.
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