December Eclipse Festival Updates

[Kristina Collins]

Hi everyone, 

Thanks and welcome to all who have joined the mailing list in the past couple of weeks. The practice run will begin in 24 hours.

I will send another email reminder tomorrow with some more detailed updates on a few topics. For now I would like to draw your attention to a few things:

Short Recordings for Practice Day. Due to the large number of experiment participants, I cannot review full 24 hour datasets from the practice runs. For tomorrow's practice run, please record and upload a file of approximately five minutes at some point during the day. There is no need to change the filename, as I can sort by the file size.  

Filenames. Please make certain that the names of the files you submit include full time and date information per the convention described on the website. For example: "W8EDU_R__2020-10-23_22-36-18.wav". 

This is necessary because I will be processing the data with a script that extracts the datetime information using the filename. Do not change or add any text to the filenames, as it will make the files more difficult to process. If there's information you'd like to record about a file, please write a description in a text file and include it in your upload.

Station Information Check: Please take a look at this participation map and verify your station information. If you don't see a dot for your station, it may be in the wrong hemisphere due to a sign error, or the coordinates may have been written in an unusable form - decimal form only, please. Email me corrected coordinates and I will adjust the map. 

Amplitude Measurement (Optional). For experienced operators: If you are able to disable the AGC on your radio, and have a separate RF gain control, Steve WA5FRF would like your help conducting amplitude measurements during the eclipse festival. This is optional. If you'd like to learn more, check out this page which describes a few different methods. Step 8 of the experiment page (so far only in the English version) describes a way to set this up, but it requires careful attention and calibration time.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and I will address them in tomorrow's update. 

Thanks and 73,

-Kristina KD8OXT