University of Scranton Professor
and HamSCI coordinator Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, has been awarded a $1.3 million grant from the National
Science Foundation to support HamSCI's personal space weather station program.
According to a university news release, grants from the NSF Aeronomy program
are extremely competitive. The three-year experiment, for which Frissell will
be principal investigator, will develop and deploy ground-based space science
observation equipment at two levels of sophistication - a low-cost,
easy-to-use, version for hams and more complex stations for use by university
partners.  |
| Dr. Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF (W2VU photo) |
The project is formally known as Distributed Arrays of Small Instruments, or DASI. The goal is to use many personal space weather stations to make simultaneous observations in many locations of conditions in the ionosphere at any given time. (See the Propagation column in CQ's November and December issues for more on the basics of space weather and its importance to hams.)