Pod Insights Short Wave Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio About this episode 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.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 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.
0:15 Emily 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.
0:29 Speaker 02 Hello, hello. Anybody there?
0:30 Emily Kwong? So Maddie. Yes, ma'am. Last week, Britt and I connected to a radio station.
0:35 Speaker 02 This is VIA Radio in Pittston, Pennsylvania.
0:38 Emily 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.
1:23 Emily 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.
1:39 Speaker 03 South Pole Station, we are ready and standing by. Thanks.
1:43 Emily Kwong? The Antarctic Christmas Carol. Basically, the different stations in Antarctica sing to each other over shortwave radio.
1:54 Speaker 04 Oh my god. This is legitimately the cutest thing perhaps I have ever heard. They're singing over the radio?
2:04 Emily Kwong? Mm-hmm. That transmission was from the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station.
2:13 Speaker 04 Amundsen, shout out.
2:14 Emily Kwong? Yeah. Here's a Christmas carol from the Italian station, Mario Zekelli, singing an Italian Christmas carol.
2:22 Speaker 04 I really like this. I firmly believe that this is cute.
2:29 Emily Kwong? Nathaniel would have to agree with you.
2:31 Speaker 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.
2:41 Emily Kwong? And Nathaniel, listening at McMurdo Station in a blue Penguin hoodie,
2:45 Speaker 04 Sure.
2:45 Emily 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?
2:56 Speaker 04 So how far away were people able to listen?
2:58 Emily 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.
3:20 Speaker 04 So today on the show, the Short Wave Podcast looks at shortwave radio, how it works, how it travels.
3:26 Emily Kwong? And how Nathaniel Frizzell is leveraging a community of shortwave radio listeners for science.
3:35 Speaker 06 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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4:56 Speaker 04 Emily Kwong, our shortwave expert is Nathaniel Frissell.
4:59 Emily Kwong? Yes, he's an assistant professor of physics and engineering at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
5:05 Speaker 04 OK, so obviously, I know of Shortwave, the charming science podcast. But tell me about shortwave as in shortwave radio.
5:13 Emily 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.
5:22 Speaker 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.
5:32 Emily 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.
5:43 Speaker 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.
5:51 Emily 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.
6:03 Speaker 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.
6:31 Emily Kwong? This is the ultimate lo-fi form of communication, I'm gathering.
6:34 Speaker 05 Right. Yeah.
6:35 Emily 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.
6:47 Speaker 04 So radio Twitter?
6:48 Emily 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.
7:02 Speaker 04 Ham?
7:03 Emily 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.
7:15 Speaker 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.
7:25 Emily 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.
7:34 Speaker 04 So just pure Bruce Springsteen propaganda?
7:36 Emily Kwong? Yeah, it was mostly just his callsign.
7:39 Speaker 05 In '73, this is W2NAF, Whiskey 2, November Alpha Foxtrot.
7:44 Emily 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.
7:59 Speaker 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.
8:10 Emily Kwong? And these moments stayed with him, propelling his scientific methodology and his career.
8:15 Speaker 04 Cool. Okay, so tell me a little bit about that. How has Nathaniel used shortwave for science?
8:20 Emily 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.
8:35 Speaker 04 So cool.
8:36 Emily Kwong? Yeah, and during the big 2017 solar eclipse, which I missed because it was cloudy.
8:41 Speaker 04 Tragedy.
8:41 Emily 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.
9:01 Speaker 04 Dang, to do what?
9:03 Emily 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.
9:14 Speaker 04 Which we don't really do right now.
9:15 Emily Kwong? No, not really.
9:16 Speaker 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?
9:28 Speaker 04 And why is that important, to understand the ionosphere to that level of detail?
9:32 Emily 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.
9:49 Speaker 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.
10:00 Emily Kwong? And in order to, you know, transmit Christmas carols around the world.
10:03 Speaker 04 Essential.
10:05 Speaker 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.
10:28 Speaker 04 Kwong, do you think our podcast connects people all around the world?
10:31 Emily Kwong? I mean, we don't have 3 million listeners. That's how many people listen to ham radio.
10:35 Speaker 04 Not yet, not with that attitude.
10:37 Emily 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.
10:49 Speaker 04 I hope so.
10:50 Emily Kwong? I think so. So, from our team to whoever is out there listening in the world, happy holidays.
10:55 Speaker 04 Happy holidays.
11:01 Emily 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.
11:43 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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