Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio

On Christmas Eve, scientists at field stations across Antarctica sing carols to one another...via shortwave. On today's episode, the Short Wave podcast explores shortwave radio. We speak with space physicist and electrical engineer Nathaniel Frissell about this Antarctic Christmas Carol tradition and his use of shortwave radio for community science. Read more https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2024/12/11/from-nepa-to-the-north-pole-ham-radio-lets-kids-talk-to-santa/ about Santa Net, which connects children (known in the shortwave radio community as "little harmonics") with Santa. Want more tech stories? Let us know by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:15Emily Kwong?

  Hey, ShortWavers. It's your favorite holiday elf, Emily Kwong, bringing you this classic episode featuring our founding host, Maddie Sofia. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Hello, hello. Anybody there?

• 0:30Emily Kwong?

  So Maddie. Yes, ma'am. Last week, Britt and I connected to a radio station.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  This is VIA Radio in Pittston, Pennsylvania.

• 0:38Emily Kwong?

  To have a conversation with space physicist and electrical engineer Nathaniel Frissell. Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. And in 2014, his research took him to Antarctica. Cool. Yeah, home to the South Pole and a hub of scientific activity with research stations and field camps spread across the continent. New Zealand has a station down there, several European countries do too. Scientists are asking questions you can only answer in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean this time of year about wildlife. Like penguins. Yeah, sure, like penguins. Microbiology, tectonics, the northern lights. Nathaniel was down there to look at the Earth's magnetic field and polar regions. I picture this whole space, Maddie, like science summer camp, but spread across a desolate icebound landscape.

• 1:23Emily Kwong?

  What a dream. Yeah, your kind of summer camp. Yeah. And these people, they're far from home, which can be really tough during the holidays. Sure. So Nathaniel, when he was down there, took part in a musical tradition that queues up on this day, December 24.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  South Pole Station, we are ready and standing by. Thanks.

• 1:43Emily Kwong?

  The Antarctic Christmas Carol. Basically, the different stations in Antarctica sing to each other over shortwave radio.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  Oh my god. This is legitimately the cutest thing perhaps I have ever heard. They're singing over the radio?

• 2:04Emily Kwong?

  Mm-hmm. That transmission was from the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Amundsen, shout out.

• 2:14Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. Here's a Christmas carol from the Italian station, Mario Zekelli, singing an Italian Christmas carol.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  I really like this. I firmly believe that this is cute.

• 2:29Emily Kwong?

  Nathaniel would have to agree with you.

• 2:31Speaker 05

  And it's a beautiful thing. And, you know, the different stations and people, they have to, they have to watch out for each other because it's, it's a difficult environment down there.

• 2:41Emily Kwong?

  And Nathaniel, listening at McMurdo Station in a blue Penguin hoodie,

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:45Emily Kwong?

  I'll add, wondered if this caroling could be heard beyond Antarctica by shortwave listeners in other parts of the world. He wanted to know, how far can these transmissions really travel?

• 2:56Speaker 04

  So how far away were people able to listen?

• 2:58Emily Kwong?

  Well, before the caroling began, Nathaniel put out an alert to shortwave radio listeners saying, hey, if you can hear this, email us and let us know. And people did. They were able to tune in. He got emails from the Netherlands, South America, places far away from Antarctica. Some people were able to catch snippets of this singing at the bottom of the world.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  So today on the show, the Short Wave Podcast looks at shortwave radio, how it works, how it travels.

• 3:26Emily Kwong?

  And how Nathaniel Frizzell is leveraging a community of shortwave radio listeners for science.

• 3:35Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 3:39Speaker 00

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• 3:56Speaker 06

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• 4:39Speaker 06

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• 4:56Speaker 04

  Emily Kwong, our shortwave expert is Nathaniel Frissell.

• 4:59Emily Kwong?

  Yes, he's an assistant professor of physics and engineering at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  OK, so obviously, I know of Shortwave, the charming science podcast. But tell me about shortwave as in shortwave radio.

• 5:13Emily Kwong?

  So since the 1900s, we've been using radio waves to communicate. The waves are all different sizes. The lower the wave's frequency, the longer the wavelength.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  One of the unique characteristics of shortwave radio is that it can travel, the radio waves can travel long distances, very long distances around the world.

• 5:32Emily Kwong?

  Because they're 3 to 30 megahertz in frequency, they travel through space to this electrically charged part of our atmosphere called the ionosphere and are reflected or refracted back down to Earth.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  If we did not have the ionosphere, these shortwave signals would travel off into space and not be able to travel around the globe.

• 5:51Emily Kwong?

  But luckily for us, they can travel around the globe. They propagate far distances, and those with receivers on Earth are able to listen. Nathaniel loves shortwave because you don't need a lot of equipment to send and capture one of these transmissions.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Oh, it can be incredibly simple. You need a transmitter on one side and a receiver on the other and a decent antenna. And when I say a transmitter, there are some people who they make their goal to talk as far around the world as possible with as little as equipment as possible, as low power as possible. So maybe using a quarter of a watt and $10 worth of parts, people are able to send signals that go all the way around the globe.

• 6:31Emily Kwong?

  This is the ultimate lo-fi form of communication, I'm gathering.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah.

• 6:35Emily Kwong?

  And that communication could be anything: broadcast, propaganda, spy stations, emergency information, weather reports, rag chewing, which is a term to describe people just talking about their daily life.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  So radio Twitter?

• 6:48Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, the transmission just has to fall within the right frequency range to count a shortwave. And there's an international community of hobby radio operators who seek out a special license from their respective governments to do this. That's called ham radio.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Ham?

• 7:03Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, that's the hobby of using this radio. So Nathaniel discovered that community on a Boy Scout jamboree. A ham radio operator had set up a station in the middle of the woods.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  I just heard all this crackling and buzzing sounds coming out of the radio, and I heard him talking to these faraway places. And that was just really fascinating to me.

• 7:25Emily Kwong?

  And he was hooked. Got his license in 1998, just a teenager transmitting to whoever was listening in the northern New Jersey, New York metropolitan area.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  So just pure Bruce Springsteen propaganda?

• 7:36Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, it was mostly just his callsign.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  In '73, this is W2NAF, Whiskey 2, November Alpha Foxtrot.

• 7:44Emily Kwong?

  '73 means best regards. It's a pretty common ham radio sign-off. Eventually, he upgraded to a better transmitter, threw a wire out the window of his bedroom and attached it to a tree in his front yard, and he managed to get a hold of a station in Hungary.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  And it was just a very short contact, but you know, that was pretty neat. You just throw a wire out your window and you're able to talk to a guy in Hungary. And, and it worked.

• 8:10Emily Kwong?

  And these moments stayed with him, propelling his scientific methodology and his career.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Cool. Okay, so tell me a little bit about that. How has Nathaniel used shortwave for science?

• 8:20Emily Kwong?

  In a lot of interesting ways, because disturbances happening in the ionosphere, space weather, solar wind conditions, all of that would affect radio waves. So in grad school, he was able to show how a solar flare caused a radio blackout.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  So cool.

• 8:36Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, and during the big 2017 solar eclipse, which I missed because it was cloudy.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Tragedy.

• 8:41Emily Kwong?

  So sad. But Nathaniel hosted a community science experiment through his group HAMSI. The group measured how the eclipse affected the transmission of medium and high-frequency radio waves. And the way he's using radio for scientific inquiry is so innovative that this year, the National Science Foundation awarded him a $1.3 million grant.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Dang, to do what?

• 9:03Emily Kwong?

  Well, he wants to bring universities and this network of ham radio operators together to track what's going on in the ionosphere, where shortwaves propagate in a more day-to-day way.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Which we don't really do right now.

• 9:15Emily Kwong?

  No, not really.

• 9:16Speaker 05

  We don't really understand what happens on short time scales. Like, why is the ionosphere doing this in, like, New York City, but doing something else in Pennsylvania, overhead in Pennsylvania?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  And why is that important, to understand the ionosphere to that level of detail?

• 9:32Emily Kwong?

  Well, we, as a planet, are really dependent on things happening in space. And disturbances in the ionosphere do affect communication satellites, global positioning systems, which are used to land planes. All these tools we rely on to keep us safe and connected.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  And so it's very important to try to understand how everything is, is connected together in order to make those systems more robust and, and in order to make them work.

• 10:00Emily Kwong?

  And in order to, you know, transmit Christmas carols around the world.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Essential.

• 10:05Speaker 05

  I think a lot of ham radio for me has always been about connecting people from different parts of the world together. And, you know, if you, if you even look at like, why ham radio exists, if you actually look in the laws, I believe it says that it's for international goodwill. And it's important to try and promote this international goodwill.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Kwong, do you think our podcast connects people all around the world?

• 10:31Emily Kwong?

  I mean, we don't have 3 million listeners. That's how many people listen to ham radio.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Not yet, not with that attitude.

• 10:37Emily Kwong?

  Okay, I know world domination is your project. But I will say, I got into radio because I enjoyed tuning in and not knowing what I was gonna hear. Our podcast definitely does that.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  I hope so.

• 10:50Emily Kwong?

  I think so. So, from our team to whoever is out there listening in the world, happy holidays.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Happy holidays.

• 11:01Emily Kwong?

  Since 2019, a lot has happened for Nathaniel. He told me that through grants from the NSF and NASA, the Hamsay Project is leading research. They're looking into how the ionosphere responded to all the recent solar eclipses. And they installed a brand-new ham radio station at the University of Scranton. They hope it will be a hub for researching the upper atmosphere. The station even lets kids talk to Santa through the Santa Net Volunteer Network. Click the link in our bio to read more about it. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you, as always, for listening to Short Wave, a science podcast from NPR.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.