[PPRAANet] propagation summit 2021

[K3ILC]

For those of you who did not attend the Propagation Summit 2021 on Zoom 
last Saturday, you missed some interesting presentations.
There were about 6,600 logged in to Zoom from all continents, except 
Antarctica.

Some of the subjects I found interesting were:
1. A project to develop an affordable personal space-weather station.
2.  Atmospheric physics -- one subject I found extremely interesting was 
determining whether the F layer was becoming higher and lower by using 
doppler shift.  The doppler shift they were measuring was sometimes a 
fraction of a Hz.  How did they do this?  They tuned their radio to use 
the WWV carrier as a standard.  They used a GPS disciplined receiver as 
a standard to measure the frequency shift in WWV's carrier.  (They said 
that some radios have a connector on the back for the GPS receiver).  
Then they used a specialized application (open source) to measure the 
shift and what the F layer is doing.
3. They also had an interesting presentation on maximizing antenna 
performance over irregular terrain.
4.  And they presented predictions and modeling of the upcoming sunspot 
cycle 25.  Estimates were all over the place, but the majority of them 
are predicting a below average sunspot maximum. (Your guess is as good 
as mine).

Videos of the presentations have been uploaded to YouTube -- the links 
are available at https://www.contestuniversity.com/videos/

The slides are available in pdf format at 
https://www.contestuniversity.com/files/

Enjoy

73
Jim Madsen
K3ILC