The University of Scranton will lead a nationwide space weather project built around amateur radio, the university announced on October 21. NASA, through its Science Activation program, has entrusted Scranton with a grant totaling 5,495,781 dollars as a five-year cooperative agreement through 2031 for a project titled Discovering the SPARC: Space Physics Through Amateur Radio Connections. Nathaniel Frissell, an associate professor of physics and engineering at Scranton, will serve as principal investigator. Frissell is also the founder of HamSCI, the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation community that has for years connected operators worldwide to collect propagation and ionospheric data as citizen scientists.
The centerpiece will be Discovery Stations at public venues such as schools, libraries and museums, where visitors can see real-time space weather data and learn how solar activity affects radio communications, GPS and other Earth technologies. The grant will also fund about 85 Citizen Science Space Weather Monitors across the country to track radio signals and ionospheric conditions for a national research network. Collaborators include the ARRL, the Space Science Institute, MIT Haystack Observatory, the University of Alabama and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, with Kera Collective as external evaluator, and the ARRL Teachers Institute will provide curriculum materials linking classroom lessons to live NASA data.
Monday also brings two operating deadlines. The ARISS Slow Scan Television Series 34 event, featuring images about ARISS hardware, ends today, Monday, October 26, at 17:45 UTC. Transmissions from the International Space Station Service Module use 437.550 MHz FM with the Robot 36 mode, 36 seconds on and two minutes off, under the callsign RS0ISS, and listeners need no license to receive the pictures. Separately, anyone who operated in the CQ World Wide DX Contest, SSB, this past weekend must move quickly: under the new 48-hour rule, SSB logs are due no later than 23:59 UTC tomorrow, October 27, with resubmissions after the deadline treated as late logs.
For ARRL members in five divisions, election voting is also in motion. Official voting documents were postal-mailed to eligible members no later than October 19, with a follow-up email scheduled for today, October 26, for members with a valid email address on file. Votes for Director and Vice Director in the Atlantic, Dakota, Delta, Great Lakes and Midwest Divisions, for three-year terms beginning January 1, 2027, must be cast electronically by noon Eastern Time on Friday, November 20. Looking to the Halloween weekend, the contest calendar lists the ARRL EME Contest, the Russian WW MultiMode Contest and the UK and EI DX Contest, SSB, from October 31 into November 1, plus the four-hour North American SSB Sprint on Saturday evening North American time, starting at 00:00 UTC on November 1.
DXers still have S9R from Sao Tome Island on the air through October 31 on the HF bands with QO-100 satellite activity planned, along with JD1BQP from Ogasawara through November 2, and KH8A from American Samoa is scheduled to start October 29 and run through November 13. Space weather itself is quiet to start the week. The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center forecast issued at 00:30 UTC today reported a greatest observed Kp of 2 over the past 24 hours, an expected maximum Kp of 3.00 for October 26 through 28, no radio blackouts observed, and only a 10 percent chance of an R1 to R2 blackout today, falling to 1 percent on October 27 and 28. No G1 or greater geomagnetic storms are expected in the three-day forecast, though the Center's weekly outlook says recurrent coronal hole high-speed streams could bring G1 storm levels on October 31.