HamSCI: The Scientific Research Component of Amateur Radio
By Eric Hendrickson
If you’re like me, you’ve always had a fascination with the way radio signals radiate from a source, travel through space, and induce a usable current in a wire far, far away. Ham radio to me is not just making the contact, but understanding the path, the conditions, the why and how. What helps that radio signal get to its destination? What hinders it and interferes with it?
That curiosity is baked into the DNA of amateur radio, and it’s exactly why I find HamSCI interesting. It’s the scientific arm of our hobby without any of the typical scientific community gatekeeping. Just hams doing real science, contributing real data, and having a real impact on the world’s understanding of our surroundings, our hobby, and physics in general.
What is HamSCI
HamSCI stands for Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation, and it’s a community effort bridging amateur radio and space science. It was founded by Dr. Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, a licensed ham and a space physicist who saw the potential in leveraging the distributed nature of amateur radio stations for serious scientific research. The core idea is beautifully simple: harness the power of the global ham radio community to collect and share radio propagation data, and use that data to study space weather, the ionosphere, and related phenomena. And it’s not just theoretical. The contributions from HamSCI participants have already found their way into peer-reviewed publications and real-world scientific modeling.
What makes HamSCI unique is that it’s not just a bunch of academics using hams as data mules. The community is genuinely collaborative. If you’ve got a station and some curiosity, you’re in. They provide the framework and support to turn everyday QSOs, WSPR beacons, and RBN spots into valuable datasets. That, to me, is the sweet spot where amateur radio becomes more than just a hobby.
HamSCI Global Research Initiatives Cover a Range of Topics
One of the flagship efforts that really put HamSCI on the map was the Eclipse Festival of 2017, and again for the 2024 solar eclipse event. Thousands of operators participated by operating on specific HF bands and uploading data during the period before, during, and after the eclipse. The goal was to measure how the sudden drop and return of solar radiation impacted the ionosphere. And the results? Fascinating. Clear dips in signal strength, propagation anomalies, and measurable changes in ionospheric density were recorded and analyzed. This data was not only published, but used by researchers to better understand D-region behavior under abrupt solar changes. It’s one of those rare cases where you can say, yes, that CW contact you logged during totality actually helped space science. To me, that’s really exciting. Being able to contribute real data to science just by playing with my hobby makes me feel pretty good.
Another interesting initiative is the Personal Space Weather Station project, or PSWS. This is an ongoing effort to create modular, scalable tools that amateur operators can deploy at home to measure local space weather conditions. The most notable piece of this puzzle is the Grape receiver, a low-cost, GPS-disciplined receiver designed to monitor signals like WWV to detect subtle variations in these signals as they interact with the ionospheric. These receivers are already deployed in the field and have been capturing excellent data on solar flare impacts, sudden ionospheric disturbances, and diurnal variations in signal strength. Because they’re GPS-disciplined, the data can be synchronized and correlated across the network with incredible precision.
The cool part is that this isn’t just an exercise in building another receiver. The Grape and similar setups are actively contributing to datasets that are being used by NASA and NSF-funded researchers. Some of the data has made its way into university-level studies, PhD dissertations, and even public policy discussions around space weather forecasting. For hams looking to leave a mark outside of the logbook, it doesn’t get much better than that.
HamSCI Makes Real Science of Amateur Radio
HamSCI also supports participation in broader networks like WSPRnet, the Reverse Beacon Network, and the WWV Monitoring Project. If you’re already running a WSPR beacon, your station is probably contributing to science whether you know it or not. HamSCI aggregates this data, correlates it with solar indices, geomagnetic storm data, and even lightning activity to build a fuller picture of how signals are affected by solar and terrestrial influences. That kind of integration is exactly what sets this community apart from isolated experiments. It’s systemic. It’s broad. And it’s really effective.
The beauty of HamSCI is that it doesn’t require a $10,000 shack or a physics degree. My station is modest — a midrange HF rig, a simple dipole, and a Raspberry Pi that logs WSPR and uploads to various networks. But through HamSCI, my little corner of RF chaos becomes a data point in a global map of ionospheric behavior. It’s the democratization of science, and amateur radio is perfectly positioned to lead it.
And it’s not just about logging and uploading. HamSCI hosts an annual workshop, bringing together researchers and operators to share results, talk tools, and brainstorm future projects. The event is part academic conference, part hamfest, and part hacker meetup. It’s where you’ll hear a presentation about VLF detection of solar flares right next to a talk on DIY GPSDO builds or portable PSWS field kits. The level of openness and enthusiasm is infectious. There’s a genuine spirit of, “hey, let’s figure this out together” that runs through the whole effort.
I think what excites me most is the forward momentum. This isn’t a nostalgia project. HamSCI is future-facing. It’s about how we adapt and contribute in a world where RF is no longer a curiosity but a critical piece of global infrastructure. Whether it’s monitoring the health of the ionosphere, studying the effects of solar storms, or just helping scientists understand why HF fades at sundown in weird ways, we’re part of that effort. And it’s only growing.
So if you’ve been feeling like your radio time needs a new sense of purpose, I can’t recommend HamSCI enough. Check out the site, read the papers, jump into the Discord, or just fire up your rig during the next coordinated event. You’ll be surprised how quickly your ordinary operating becomes part of something extraordinary. In a hobby where experimentation has always been part of the fun, HamSCI brings a new kind of satisfaction — knowing that your signals don’t just go out into the ether, they help decode it.
