
On the Hudson Valley 80 Meter Net and other HF nets you will often hear amateur radio operators offering signal reports and describing their listening experience. Some will also add comments as to what they think is the cause of the conditions they describe.
A helpful descriptive comment by Matt KB2GGF stimulated my own thinking about the type of evidence we would need to identify the actual ‘root cause’ of the varying conditions we encounter while communicating using Single Side Band (SSB) on HF frequencies.
Matt said that the ‘up and down’ noise he was hearing was coming in ‘waves’ similar to what you might hear on a beach. His comment led me to an interesting article titled ‘Ham Radio Operators Tune in to Giant Waves in the Earth’s Ionosphere’ [https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/citizenscience/ham-radio-operators-tune-in-to-giant-waves-in-the-earths-ionosphere.]
The article points out that ‘Sometimes the electrons in the upper atmosphere clump up and form giant waves larger than Texas that zip around the Earth faster than a jet plane!’
Possibly these rapidly changing ‘electron waves’ contribute to part of our Ham radio listening experience. I plan to contact some of the folks involved in the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation project [HamSCI https://hamsci.org] supported by a NASA and National Science Foundation to learn more about this interesting phenomenon.
If you have something to contribute on this topic and/or have more information on NASA’s Citizen Science projects [https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience] please share your comments about this below or in your own post using this category of our Forum.
https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience