Regional Contributions
Australian and New Zealand Contributions
Australia has been an active participant in this field for the better part of a century, and the work has pivoted decisively toward SDR-based instrumentation in the past decade. The Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre — operated by the Bureau of Meteorology from offices in Adelaide, and successor to the Ionospheric Prediction Service founded in 1947 — runs the regional warning centre for the Australasian sector of the International Space Environment Service, and maintains a network of magnetometers, ionosondes, and solar observatories across Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. The University of Adelaide's Buckland Park field facility, with its long history of MF and HF ionospheric research, radar meteor work, and radio astronomy under Elford and Briggs, has more recently demonstrated the use of a VHF wind-profiling radar for observing objects in low Earth orbit, including the Chinese space station Tiangong-1, with potential application to total electron content measurements — an explicitly software-defined instrument repurposed for space-situational-awareness research. At DSTG Edinburgh, Dr Manuel Cervera, also Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide, leads development of PHaRLAP, a Matlab toolbox providing 2D and fully magneto-ionic 3D numerical ray tracing for HF propagation in the ionosphere, now used internationally for over-the-horizon radar work and routinely validated against propagation data harvested from amateur SDR networks.
That citizen-science contribution is now almost entirely software-defined. The Wireless Institute of Australia, founded in 1910 and the world's oldest national amateur radio society, anchors a VK community whose stations are increasingly built around the KiwiSDR — a 14-bit wideband HF SDR by John Seamons (ZL/KF6VO) covering the entire 10 kHz–30 MHz VLF/LF/MW/HF spectrum at once, RX888 MkII direct-sampling receivers running KA9Q-radio, and Airspy HF+ Discovery units. Coupled to WSJT-X and to WsprDaemon, a Linux service that decodes WSPR and FST4W spots from one or more SDRs and uploads them to public databases such as wsprnet.org, recording additional information including Doppler shift and background noise level, a single Australian station with a single antenna can now simultaneously monitor every active HF band — feeding WSPRNet, the Reverse Beacon Network, PSKReporter, and VKLogger continuously. Australian-hosted SDR stations have supplied propagation observations to peer-reviewed studies, including the systematic study of 7 MHz greyline propagation between New Zealand/Eastern Australia and the UK/Europe using WSPR observations, and have participated in coordinated international campaigns such as the HamSCI Festival of Eclipse Science, where multiband KiwiSDR and RX888 receivers running WsprDaemon captured FST4W transmissions during the October 2023 eclipse to study D-region absorption, F2 critical-frequency response, and Doppler-shift signatures, alongside scientific-grade Grape and TangerineSDR instruments. The same SDR principles that frame this conference are also how the data is being gathered — and Australian contributors are visible at every level of the work, from defence research to backyard antenna.
