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| The eclipse will be about this good from northern Britain. |
The RSGB's G0KYA has a great experiment for the general public to participate in, which involves listening to a chosen medium wave broadcast station a few hundred km away, to see if the temporary darkness brought on by the eclipse leads to stronger signals due to much reduced ionising sunlight.
G0YKA's take on it is to use a simple transistor radio and just report the times when the signal is stronger and weaker. Hams can use their rigs, which generally cover the MW bands on RX, and software can be used to record the proceedings for later analysis.
One avenue that isn't mentioned, and that might encourage involvement, is the use of software-defined radios available freely on the internet. Choose one not too far away, and then listen to, say RUV 1 in Iceland (207kHz), which has a nice line across the shadow to the UK.
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| Degrees of darkness for March 20th, 2015. |
One big advantage of the web SDR applet is that you can record .WAV files of the received signals directly onto your PC, so the whole listening experiment during the eclipse needs nothing more than a PC.
Having checked out RUV 1 during the day, it's only weakly detectable, but enough to confirm it's the station in question. At night, I've confirmed it's obviously much stronger.
The web SDR sites, not all of which cover MW, are spread over the globe. The best MW coverage receiver in the UK is sadly blighted by quite a lot of local noise, and hits RUV 1 quite badly.
So, instead, I'm using a very fine Dutch web SDR which has no nosie at all, found here: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
At least for this UK astronomical event, bad weather won't prevent some form of enjoyment of it going ahead!
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