Registration is now open for the 2021 HamSCI Workshop, Friday and Saturday, March 19 – 20. The theme of this year’s workshop is midlatitude ionospheric science. The University of Scranton will serve as host for the Zoom virtual event, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program will include guest speakers, poster presentations, and demonstrations.

The workshop will also serve as a team meeting for the HamSCI Personal Space Weather Station project, funded by an NSF grant to University of Scranton physics and electrical engineering professor Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF. The project seeks to harness the power of an amateur radio network to better understand and measure the effects of weather in the upper levels of Earth’s atmosphere.

The workshop’s keynote address on the “History of Radio” will be given by Elizabeth Bruton, curator of technology and engineering at the Science Museum of London. She will discuss the history, science, technology, and licensing of radio amateur communities from the early 1900s to the present, exploring how individuals and communities contributed to “citizen science” long before the term entered popular usage in the 1990s. Bruton has been a non-licensed member of Oxford and District Amateur Radio Society since 2014 and has served as the society’s web manager since 2015.

J. Michael Ruohoniemi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech and principal investigator of the Virginia Tech SuperDARN Initiative, will review the physics of the midlatitude ionosphere and discuss ways in which the amateur radio community can contribute to advancing scientific understanding and technical capabilities.

Joe Dzekevich, K1YOW, will present “Amateur Radio Observations and The Science of Midlatitude Sporadic E.”

The event will also include virtual oral presentations by researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, MIT Haystack Observatory, the University of Oslo, the University of Bath, Case Western Reserve University, Dartmouth College, the University of Alabama, Clemson University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and The University of Scranton, among others.

University of Scranton students Veronica Romanek, KD2UHN; Cuong Nguyen; and M. Shaaf Sarwar, KC3PVF, are among the iPoster presenters.

Participation is free. The 2021 HamSCI Workshop is supported by the National Science Foundation and The University of Scranton. — University of Scranton news release