Le bimbe di Sulu

https://github.com/AlessioCarpegna/Radioverse

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w8UEUFQqd1KlQpr5FfK1EGwrf3duY8YT?usp=sharing

RADIOVERSE targets amateur radio enthusiasts, scientists, and newbies fascinated by the subject matter.

Amateur radio data is a cheap and fundamental means for reconstructing Earth's ionosphere, an atmospheric layer whose reflection is key to long-range radio communications.

Early detection or even prevention of disturbances in its density can help maintain services such as telecommunications and GPS up and running.

However, data from ham-radio stations on Earth is nearly impossible to find, access, or use for free. When it can be find, it is hard to process because of messy formats and incomplete and obscure software. At the same time, the ham-radio on board the ISS does not provide enough data to this end.

RADIOVERSE aims at gathering a community for

• hosting data collected by radio enthusiasts in an open standard format
• providing it for free, together with a FLOSS suite of algorithms
• engaging new and old ham-radio users with a fun gamification app

During the hackathon, we were able to design a preliminary version of the RADIOVERSE ecosystem, and to develop a small part of it:

• A python notebook for reconstructing and showing the ionosphere starting from ISS ham-radio data. The notebook has the double purpose of

1. Giving a glimpse of the relevance of ham-radio data
2. Offering an interactive primer for targeted libraries (spacepy, cartopy, cdflib) and tools for data handling and visualization (pandas, numpy, matplotlib).

• A mock-up for the gamification app with three sample activities

1. Using your radio apparatus, contact one of the available ham-radio stations on the map to unlock new stations and collect "R" coins. The message content (to be better defined) would include the ham-radio ID and a timestamp. The receiving station enriches the message with the timestamp at receival, and sends it to our server. This, in turn, notifies your app. 
2. Participate in quests -- e.g. 7-days streak in contacting ham-radio stations -- to earn additional "R" coins and special badges to show off!
3. Use your "R" coins to customize your avatar and equip them with your preferred clothing and the latest tech!

• A website -- indeed, the ppt presentation itself! -- to show how we would integrate open data, open software, and open knowledge.

We used some sample datasets from NASA (https://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/), in particular the following data in cdf format about electron density:

iss_sp_fpmu_20211029_v01.cdf

iss_sp_fpmu_20211030_v01.cdf

iss_sp_fpmu_20211031_v01.cdf

iss_sp_fpmu_20211101_v01.cdf

iss_sp_fpmu_20211102_v01.cdf

iss_sp_fpmu_20211103_v01.cdf

We mangled and plotted this data to understand and establish significance for our idea. The plots are available on our repository: https://github.com/AlessioCarpegna/Radioverse 

The takeaway message is that we need more data to populate the maps. It is cheap, it is already gathered by radio amateurs. We only need good practices and reliable tools.

Our experience has been very positive, the only drawback was the complete absence of raw data that set us back on the development part of our idea. However, we steered towards the "making community" part, that otherwise might have been less developed.

We chose this challenge because we usually work and study in a very different area and wanted to feel the thrill of the unknown. We learned tons of new exciting skills and we hope to do so again in the upcoming hackathons.

We hope you like our idea, in Turin it was much appreciated!

Data:

https://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Software libraries:

spacepy -- https://spacepy.github.io/

cartopy -- https://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/latest/

cdflib -- https://pypi.org/project/cdflib/

additional and common python libraries (matplotlib and similar)

Images:

https://ulcar.uml.edu/digisonde_dps.html

https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/iono/grams.html

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ionospheric-effects-on-electromagnetic-wave-propagation-http-www2nictgojp_fig1_258379340

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/ionosphere

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sulu_gip.jpg

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/TEC-map-for-June-5th-at-1230-from-AENeAS_fig4_335119956

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1214975.shtml

https://www.theloulander.com/mango-app-avatars/ 

https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vectors/europe-travel-vectors

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.badgecraft&hl=en_IE&gl=US

https://www.arrivalguides.com/en/Travelguide/Paris/doandsee/la-tour-eiffel-16066

https://www.experiment.org/program/spain-cultural-discovery/

#ionosphere, #hamradio, #ham-radio, #iss, #dataprocessing, #datavisualization, #gamification, #python, #openscience, #opensource, #opendata