This weeks AMSAT news included an item advising that Stanford University is now dedicating its “folding@home” distributed computing application to determining the protein binding mechanism of the COVID-19 virus which, it is hoped, would lead to development of a vaccine or other mitigating therapy. You can find the link easily enough by searching for “folding@home” and picking the link to Stanford’s web site. Please join the fight. The more of us volunteering our idle computer time to this effort, the better chance we have at getting a handle on this disease.
The Science and Technology Museum has issued a notice to the General Public that its facilities are closed until further notice, presumably due to the COVID-19 virus containment situation. As all facilities are closed, this includes the OVMRC meeting room, therefore the March OVMRC meeting is cancelled by authority relayed to me by Norm, VE3LC, Club Vice-President. We will continue to monitor the situation with hopes that we can resume with the next scheduled meeting in April.
Now that we’ve gone through the December solstice and are approaching
the March equinox. I figure it’s about time to update what’s happening
with the 80 metre band noise trends. The solar flux remains quite low
and constant, essentially unchanged from a nominal value of 70 since
July 2019. Despite this, the band does open up quite well in the
evening and there’s a lot of DX to be had on FT8.
Regarding
the 24 hour noise floor snapshots, I now have a set from October 2019
to March 2020 – roughly 6 months covering a period about 2 weeks after
the 2019 equinox to 3 weeks before the next equinox. I’ve combined the
charts into a mp4 movie with each month’s record pausing for 10
seconds. If you have a decent mp4 media player (such as VLC) you can
pause in the transition regions to examine more closely how things
change from month to month.
Quite
frankly, I was encouraged to see the change in the diurnal noise floor
between October/19 and January/20, but things don’t seem to be changing
as quickly as I thought between January and March. Maybe there’s a lag
and an effect associated with the solar analemma that I haven’t
considered yet. Anyway, here’s the movie for your pleasure.
