Focus on Faculty
Nathaniel Frissell operates a ham radio station in a tent at the annual Field Day operating event. The Personal Space Weather Station project seeks to use signals by stations such as these to help understand the ionosphere and the impact of space weather on communications. INSET: Nathaniel Frissell, Ph.D., physics and electrical engineering professor
Professor Awarded $1.3 Million Grant A $1.3 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to physics and electrical engineering professor Nathaniel Frissell, Ph.D., seeks to harness the power of a network of licensed amateur radio operators to better understand and measure the effects of weather in the upper levels of Earth’s atmosphere. The highly competitive grant awarded by NSF’s Aeronomy Program for the project titled “Distributed Arrays of Small Instruments (DASI)” will be implemented over a three-year period. As principal investigator, Dr. Frissell, a space physicist, will lead a collaborative team, which will develop modular, multi-instrument, ground-based space science observation equipment and data collection and analysis software. He will also recruit multiple universities and ham radio users to operate the network of “Personal Space Weather Stations” developed. The space weather equipment will be developed at two levels of sophistication: one at a low-cost, easy-to-use level for the ham radio operators; and one that is more complex for university partners that will allow for the collection of additional data. “The equipment and network allows us to measure and characterize ionospheric and geomagnetic short-term, 12
THE SCRANTON JOURN A L
small scale variability on a large geographic scale in order to understand the response of the ionosphere to sources from above (space weather) and below (atmospheric forcing),” said Dr. Frissell in the grant project proposal. “By designing Personal Space Weather Stations variants at multiple price points, open sourcing the hardware and software, and directly engaging with the ham radio community, this project maximizes the chances of widespread adoption of this system.” In the U.S., there are more than 730,000 licensed amateur radio operators and nearly 3 million worldwide. For this initiative, Dr. Frissell will target the ham radio community through the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation collective, which he leads, and the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) amateur radio engineering organization. Dr. Frissell joined the faculty at Scranton in the fall of 2019. He earned a master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, and a bachelor’s degree in physics and music education from Montclair State University in New Jersey. He is the founder and lead organizer of the international citizen science space physics research collective known as the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI.org).
