“Whiskey. Alpha. Two. Echo. Whisky. Yankee. WA2EWY club station,” Staves said.

After giving his location in Tupper Lake to the net controller, he told people listening from around the East Coast about how amateur radio operators in the Tri-Lakes are preparing for the April 8 total solar eclipse. Tupper Lake is just south of center in the path of totality.

While they take in the rare sight of the moon blocking out the sun, Staves said they will also be capitalizing on the rare chance to study a total solar eclipse’s effects on the Earth’s ionosphere and providing that data to researchers at universities and NASA.

The ionosphere is a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere where gas particles are electrically charged, or ionized, by the sun’s radiation. Humans use this layer miles and miles up in the sky to bounce radio signals off of, allowing them to travel around the curvature of the Earth to faraway lands.

Marc Staves looks at a database while speaking over ham radio at the Adirondack Sky Center and Observatory on Friday. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

Staves, a trustee with the ASCO and a licensed radio operator, said a handful of radio operators will be at the observatory on eclipse day to participate in two radiosport events: a solar eclipse QSO party and the Gladstone Signal Spotting Challenge — one for voice, one for digital information.

These contests are being put on by the partially-NASA-funded HamSCI “Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation” and the University of Scranton. Their goal is to encourage amateur radio operators to gather data for their research during the eclipse.

In Tupper Lake, they’ll be using a Yaesu FT-950 for voice and a Ten-Tec Jupiter “whisper station” for digital transmitting. Both operate in the high frequency “HF” bands from 30 to 50 megahertz.

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Radio party

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The solar eclipse QSO party is a contest to see who can make the most voice contacts with other stations during the eclipse, a time of heightened reach for certain radio waves.

“QSO” is shorthand for making radio contact.

Staves said they’ll be operating out of the East Coast Amateur Radio Service and calling out a “CQ,” a call for any station.

“You’ll hear people calling ‘CQ, CQ, CQ, solar eclipse QSO party’ or ‘SEQP,'” Staves said.

After the other station tunes in, they’ll give a call sign, a time, a location and a signal report. Some will do this over Morse code, Staves said.

“Every one of those contacts that we make then becomes a data point for researchers,” Staves said. “It’s a good way of getting a lot of data, because you’ve got a lot of people doing it. The more data points you have, the more accurate your results are.”

This data gets put in a database where researchers will use it to run simulations to see what the ionosphere is doing during an eclipse.

The Gladstone Signal Spotting Challenge will use a signal with digital information.

The Ten-Tec Jupiter “whisper station” is connected to a computer and special software. The station makes a high-pitched constant tone. Staves said this tone carries information with a low wattage power, like what it takes to run a night light.

This gets transmitted into the ionosphere where it refracts off the layer and can be picked up by other stations. Stations across the country will be listening on April 8 and decoding that information, which carries a call sign, the time, a location and a signal strength report.

This all gets logged into a website. After the eclipse, the University of Scranton will go through this site and scrape the data.

Staves said they have the antenna for this radio pointing southwest — the direction the eclipse will be traveling from.

Staves got into amateur radio operation through the Tupper Lake High School club. When the club went defunct, a couple of its former members renewed the school club’s call sign “WA2EWY” with the Federal Communications Commission and kept it alive. But it hasn’t really been used since the late 1990s.

Staves’ former club-mate Tim Moody is coming up from Albany to be part of the eclipse radio party.

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Radio and the atmosphere

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The ionosphere is stimulated when electrical particles from the sun. During an eclipse, the ionosphere is thinned, which disrupts some radio waves, but extends the reach and strength of others.

Scientists want to learn more about what happens to the ionosphere during a total solar eclipse, and the difference in how radio wave signals travel and behave in the atmosphere during that time can help them.

There’s a lot of cross-over between amateur radio operation and astronomy, Staves said. One is often an avenue into taking an interest in the other, and there are even radio telescopes. One at the observatory picks up radio storms coming from Jupiter and its moon “Io.”

Staves was setting up equipment there on Friday morning when he caught the graph showing this radio receiver’s observations out of the corner of his eye. There had just been a giant spike in the electromagnetic signature of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Shortly before then, Staves said he’d felt a rumble. This was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake, which happened in New Jersey at around 10:23 a.m.

Looking at the chart, Staves pointed to two smaller disturbances in ionospheric activity leading up to the massive spike, tremors in the Earth measured in its atmosphere.

By 11 a.m. the earthquake dominated the chat over the ham radio, as operators from New Jersey gave damage reports and folks elsewhere wished them safety.

Ham radio is mostly a hobby for many people, Staves said. Often, ham radio operators are on the waves “rag-chewing,” just shooting the breeze. Some use it for playing chess, he said.

But in addition to friendship, it is useful in emergencies, too, he added,

With concerns that cell towers could be overloaded due to the crowds anticipated to travel to the Adirondacks for the eclipse on Monday, local fire departments are also coordinating with volunteer ham radio operators to assist in reporting potential emergencies during the event.

They might even be one of Staves’ QSOs.