PW’s monthly roundup of news from the UK and internationally, including new products, club news and recent events.

Have you got something to tell our readers about? If so, then email practicalwireless@warnersgroup.co.uk

GATEWAYS ON THE AIR: An inaugural Gateways On The Air Event will be held on 12 to 20 June. The main aim of GOTA is to increase RF communications and ‘Portable/Mobile activity’ over an eight-day period though linked Analogue and Digital Simplex Gateways, which are accessible to all licensed amateur radio operators. www.gota.org.uk

RSGB LAUNCHES NEW VIDEO: 2020 was a ‘year like no other’ for everyone around the world. In the UK, the Radio Society of Great Britain and radio amateurs rose to the challenge. The Society has launched a new video that looks back at the many fantastic activities and resources that helped to support radio amateurs through these difficult times. It also shows how existing radio amateurs ‘got on the air to care’ across the UK and thousands of people of all ages got involved in amateur radio for the first time.

In addition, the RSGB YouTube channel now has two videos to help radio amateurs understand the Ofcom EMF licence changes. In the first video, EMC Chair John Rogers M0JAV explains how to use the EMF calculator. The second video is the live webinar he presented as part of the RSGB AGM and which is now available separately. All videos are available at: www.youtube.com/theRSGB

RSGB ELECTION RESULTS 2021: The RSGB election results were announced at the AGM on Saturday 24 April 2021: Stewart Bryant G3YSX has been elected as President of the Society and will serve until the 2023 AGM. Dave Wilson M0OBW has been elected as a Director of the Society and will serve until the 2024 AGM. Paul Devlin G1SMP and David Hills G6PYF have been endorsed as nominated Directors of the Society and will serve until the 2024 AGM.

In Region 6, Liz Cabban GW0ETU and in Region 12, David De La Haye M0MBD were elected unopposed and their appointments start after the AGM. There were no valid nominations for Region 2. Congratulations to all and many thanks to those Directors who have stood down or reached the end of their term during the year.

OFCOM RELEASE DATABASE OF ISSUED UK AMATEUR RADIO CALLSIGNS: (from ICQ Podcast) On 20 April 2021, in response to a Freedom of Information request, Ofcom released a database of 96,776 issued amateur radio callsigns for the UK and Crown Dependencies.

The database can be useful for people wanting to apply for a specific callsign as it shows calls that are not available for issue. Download the Issued Callsigns Database from: https://tinyurl.com/yfaoyz4k

To determine which callsigns might be available, in addition to the database of issued callsigns you should also use the Ofcom database of Forbidden Suffixes: https://tinyurl.com/yff8y2c7

CHANGES TO THE RSGB 50MHZ AWARDS: The RSGB Awards Manager has reviewed the current 50MHz awards offered by the Society and concluded that the existing 50MHz 2-Way Countries and 50MHz DX Countries awards are significantly duplicating each other. The plan is to amalgamate these two awards into one single 50MHz Countries award, while keeping all the incremental levels of award in both of the existing 50MHz awards. If you’ve been working towards either of the current 50MHz awards you will have until the end of the year to complete them. A new award for 50MHz operation will be launching soon.

SCIENTISTS INVENT METHOD FOR PREDICTING SOLAR RADIO FLUX FOR TWO YEARS AHEAD: Since the launch of Sputnik, the Earth’s first artificial satellite, in 1957, more than 41,500 tons of manmade objects have been placed in orbit around the Sun, the Earth, and other planetary bodies. Since that time, the majority of objects, such as rocket bodies and large pieces of space debris, re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled way, posing a potential hazard to people and infrastructure. Predicting the re-entry date and time is a challenging task, as one needs to specify the density of the upper Earth atmosphere that strongly depends on solar activity which, in turn, is hard to predict. Earth’s atmosphere can become very heated due to solar activity, which causes it to expand, and a satellite can decay in its orbit and fall back to the Earth due to the effect known as atmospheric drag.

An international group of scientists led by Skoltech professor Tatiana Podladchikova developed a new method and software called RESONANCE (‘Radio Emissions from the sun: ONline ANalytical Computer-aided Estimator’), which provides predictions of the solar radio flux at F10.7 and F30cm with a lead time of one to 24 months. The F10.7 and F30 indices represent the flux density of solar radio emissions at a wavelength of 10.7 and 30cm averaged over an hour and serve as a solar proxy of the ultraviolet solar emission that heats the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The method combines state-ofart physics-based models and advanced data assimilation methods, where the resulting F10.7 and F30 forecasts are used as solar input in the re-entry prediction tool for further estimation of an object re-entry time.

“We systematically evaluated the performance of RESONANCE in providing re-entry predictions on past ESA re-entry campaigns for 602 payloads and rocket bodies as well as 2,344 objects of space debris that re-entered from 2006 to 2019 over the full 11-year solar cycle. The test results demonstrated that the predictions obtained by RESONANCE in general also lead to improvements in the forecasts of re-entry epochs and can thus be recommended as a new operational service for re-entry predictions and other space weather applications”, says lead author and Skoltech’s MSc graduate Elena Petrova.

“The number of re-entered objects is closely related to the solar activity level: the majority of objects return during the maximum solar activity phase within the 11-year cycle. Interestingly, the space debris re-entry time closely follows the evolution of the cycle, reacting immediately to changes in solar activity. At the same time, payloads and rocket bodies also show a large number of re-entries during the declining phase of the cycle, which may be related to the time delay between solar activity and re-entry for large objects”, says Professor Astrid Veronig, a coauthor of the study and director of Kanzelhöhe Observatory at the University of Graz. Currently, the team is preparing RESONANCE for operational use as part of a new space weather service for continuous prediction of solar radio flux activity.