The collaborative spirit of this conference has deep roots in citizen science. HamSCI — the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation — brings together amateur radio operators and professional researchers from institutions including MIT’s Haystack Observatory, Case Western Reserve University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, with funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation. The central insight behind HamSCI is straightforward: amateur operators going about their normal activity — transmitting, listening, logging contacts and beacon signals — collectively produce a distributed sensing network of global scale. Data flowing into WSPRNet, the Reverse Beacon Network, and PSKReporter from thousands of stations simultaneously captures the state of the ionosphere in a way no dedicated research infrastructure could afford to replicate.
The results speak for themselves. During the 2017, 2023, and 2024 solar eclipses, coordinated HamSCI campaigns turned the amateur radio community into a continent-wide ionospheric observatory — operators equipped with GRAPE receivers and Personal Space Weather Stations captured the ionosphere’s response to the eclipse shadow in real time, producing datasets that fed directly into peer-reviewed space-weather research. Travelling ionospheric disturbances, solar flare blackouts, geomagnetic storm impacts on HF propagation — all of it is being studied using data that amateurs generated as a byproduct of doing what they already love. SDR 2026 is explicitly inviting this community to present that work: what you built, what you measured, and what it showed.
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