Amateur Radio Operator Reaches Out to the World During Eclipse:

eHam.net News — The kids might have been back in school, but that didn’t stop many adults from gathering at Galt Community Park Monday morning to experience the solar eclipse. Local Amateur Radio enthusiast Bob Schuldeisz set up his HAM radio antennae to participate in a worldwide Solar Eclipse QSO Party. The objective of the party, put simply, was to test the airwaves before, during and after the eclipse. Schuldeisz was just one of 600 stations around the world participating in the experiment. According to Schuldeisz, Amateur radio long distance communications take place on frequencies in the radio spectrum known as high frequencies (HF). These communications can be any where in the U.S. or across the world. The radio signals can travel these long distances by reflecting off the ionosphere and the earth’s surface. The ionosphere is located between 25 and 200 miles above the earth’s surface. The reflective properties of the ionosphere are caused by the sun. Energetic particles from the sun ionize the atmosphere at these heights and this gives the ionosphere the radio signal reflective properties. These properties change from daylight to night. This solar eclipse experiment is to see if the shadow of the sun, as it moves across the country, causes similar effects. Using Morse Code, Schuldeisz began communicating with others around the world around 9 a.m. and continued until after 1 p.m. As he made contact, he logged the technical information into a software program. His data, along with all those participating, was then sent to Virginia Tech, which will process the data.

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