Since we all rely (With this system) on good Satellite communication I thought it might be a good idea to put out a report that shows the Space weather forecast for the month. This can come in handy when trying to troubleshoot reception issues or anomalies. Here is a sample: a K index of 5 or greater is indication of a storm that can affect reception. Here is a link to include this in the content that is delivered down to the outernet. http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/text/27-day-outlook.txt
the HTML markup kinda fubar’d the format of the below paste. click on the above link to see the correct format of the text file.
Thoughts? They have a huge set of datasets that we have access to that are pretty easy to parse and upload.
I just uploaded the post below to try it out.
:Product: 27-day Space Weather Outlook Table 27DO.txt
:Issued: 2017 Jan 02 0408 UTC
Prepared by the US Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center
Why can’t Outernet offer a “telemetry on” option for sending back the L-Band signal data and geographic position to a central CROWD-SOURCED database. Eventually we will have millions of L-Band receivers sending back reports which could be analyzed to show the changes in the electrical / radio properties between the 3 Inmarsat Satellites and earth.
Occultation is a similar system, used to analyze the GPS signal as it passes across the earth surface allowing satellites with a simple GPS interface to create data from which we can then measure air pressure.
I would be most pleased to assist in the pursuit of science particularly if it helped improve the knowledge of L-Band transmission.
I think this stuff is really interesting.
I am a self taught Ham so I sort of did not get a grounding in this kind of Communication Science.
Can you give us a bit of an idiot guide to these numbers.
Ie
how are they doing the prediction.
Is it sunspot related.
Is historic information repeating itself.
Are sats in distant space feeding down telemetry warning us.
Since the earth spins is this data only for USA or is it averaged for the world.
What dissipation / attenuation of a signal is a 6, 7, 8 on the scale.
@Seasalt me too You may like to look at this site http://spaceweathernews.com/ all the data is in one place, and the idea behind the site is that people learn how to understand it, and what it all means.
There is a video by the same fellow called “How to watch the Sun” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld5ecZuHECA you can skip the first 5 minutes or so it is just music.
I am also a self taught Ham. Although I had the wonderful fortune of meeting one of the members on this site many years ago, RadioRay. Aside from being a great friend he is one of the most knowledgeable people about anything RF related that I have ever met.(and also many more subjects). His approach to teaching me “ham” radio and all things RF revolved around him getting me hooked on some aspect of it by demonstrating (bringing some gadget that did wild and awesome things) something new. It worked for sure! He cost me a ton of $$ in wonderful toys, massive amounts of time learning new and “scary” things and pushed me into further education that laid the foundation for a fantastic and rewarding career. Not sure he knows it or not but he was absolutely responsible for me starting my own company after leaving that career…
@Seasalt, Having said all that, I will try to put together the answers to your questions above. @neil Thank you for posting the link. That was the exact link I was going to post for folks to learn about space weather.
Thanks heaps guys for bringing this up. This is EXACTLY the kind of information i.e. RF Propagation and Space weather I need. As I think all of us understanding L-Band prorogation issues better, will have an enormous impact on improving our Outernet L-Band experience.
Especially in my next favorite experiment, (APRS was the first) which is to make a hemispherical non directional Outernet antenna for a car or boat.
You may like to look at this site