QSL Cards: Ghosts in the Air Glow and High-Freq Active Auroral Research (HAARP) | Hacker News Reader

QSL Cards: Ghosts in the Air Glow and High-Freq Active Auroral Research (HAARP)

goughlui.com

61 pointswalterbell29 comments

https://ghostsintheairglow.space/about-project

> Ghosts in the Air Glow is an ionospheric transmission art project using the HAARP Ionospheric Research Instrument to play with the liminal boundaries of earth's atmosphere and outer space. Air Glow (artificial aurora) and Luxembourg experiments (ionospheric mixing) will be paired with the AM modulation of Narrow Band Television (NBTV) video art, Slow Scan Television (SSTV) images, spoken word, and sound art created by Amanda Dawn Christie. As a citizen science experiment to learn more about propagation, shortwave listeners from around the world are invited to tune in and submit reception reports online through the project's website ... in exchange for QSL cards.

Why is it that the word "liminal" only gets used in the most pretentious of contexts?

You don't have functional liminal art at boundaries of your abode? I bet you call them doormats or something.

Hams can apply for special call signs for special events. Lots of times it's groups or organized around special location.

I know there has been a movement to move QSL cards to completely digital. Maybe I'm old school but for over fifty years (in my case) getting a stack of QSL cards in the mailbox has always been a rush.

Why is it called QSL? In the early days of Morse telegraphy a set of Q codes evolved as a sort of short hand for commonly sent messages. Some of these are still used in ham radio such as QRM which means interference. Sorry I didn't get all that there was too much QRM from the Russian Buzzer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QSL_card

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76

This has nothing to do with any "ham" special event station.

QSL cards are great reminders of history and conversations had, even if brief. I have a bunch of my dad's cards starting from in the mid 50's from all over the world.

Sends me back to the mid-1960's. My bedroom wall covered with QSL cards. Tossed by my parents when I went to grad school. Sigh...

The cards received from HAARP are interesting to me in that I was under the notion that the facility had been shut down. I did not realize that the university was still operating it. I don't know why, but that makes me kind of happy.

One of HAARPs original goals was to allow for radio waves to be bounced off of a part of the atmosphere that HAARP would energized to allow for communication without direct line of sight. This is similar to a solar flare that would doing the exact same thing which allows for low frequency radio waves to be bounced . The development of satellites and or their technologies basically achieved the same goal so they probably only had academic support after that.

Warning: Tangent bordering on fringe science

HAARP can, for the price of a megawatt, modulate the conductivity of portions of the ionosphere. That same ionosphere is in contact with a few gigawatts of direct current in the form of solar flux. It's possible that you could modulate the ionosphere and a few tens of hertz and capture a large portion of the resultant power.

I think this is what Tesla meant to do with Wardenclyffe Tower. His definition of unlimited energy actually isn't that much in modern terms. The disruptions it would cause would cause the existing power grid would likely also be far worse than the possible gigawatt of power it could yield. The effects of such harvesting on the ozone layer are also likely to be negative.

Have you read The Three Body Problem?

Definitely a different scenario there. GP is only proposing messing with Earth's atmosphere, not the sun itself. ;)

I barely made it through Wikipedia's[1] plot summary... no, I haven't read it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

Also probably the disruption of other radio wave bands…

Just in case anybody is wondering: this is about amateur Radio. In this case about a special post card

No, this isn't about "amateur radio" at all.

QSL cards aren't limited to Amateur Radio. Commercial broadcast and shortwave stations will send them out, too, in response to listener requests. The HAARP is most certainly not an "Amateur Radio" station. https://haarp.gi.alaska.edu/

While the person producing the content has an amateur radio license, HAARP is not a part of the amateur radio service, and the frequencies used are outside the permitted amateur radio bands.

The transmission is from experimental radio station WI2XFX licensed to the University of Alaska - Fairbanks [1].

[1] (PDF) <https://haarp.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/2021-08/WI2X...>

I thought HAARP had roots deep back into the 1950s but all I can find is the 90s. Were there not earlier HAAARP-like experiments being run in the far north by NATO economies seeking to use the ionised layer for secure communications, as well as doing fundamental research into the ionosphere?

I'm not seeking to feed the conspiracy: I really did think there was some prior art here. I haven't searched deeply.

> I thought HAARP had roots deep back into the 1950s but all I can find is the 90s.

maybe you're just experiencing some "mandela effect"

> I'm not seeking to feed the conspiracy

in that case you should not search too deeply

>> I'm not seeking to feed the conspiracy

> in that case you should not search too deeply

this made my day. i was married into a conspiracy cult, and HAARP was one of my favorites. of the concept of mix some truth with the lie to make it easier to swallow, the stories from this place were just so sci-fi cool that "I want to believe" them.

Elana Freeland has a 2021 book which mixes geoengineering and synbio (synthetic biology) topics.

" I have no idea what the chevrons mean, but apparently they are not to be covered …"

my hunch would be alignment cues for automated feed systems? i'm just making that up because it sounds intelligent.

anybody know what they're actually for?

Quick search brings up it indicates Business Reply Mail

Ctrl F for chevron https://www.postgrid.ca/business-reply-mail-brm/

That's so much less exotic than I wanted it to be

Is this only receivable in Canada? Will I be able to receive their signals in Asia? I see they have another session next year

Author is in Asia-Pacific, https://goughlui.com/about-me-a-short-bio/

> Currently, I reside mainly at Quakers Hill, in the west of Sydney, Australia

With a suitable receiver and aerial you may be able to receive them in Asia. Looking at the QSL cards sent they're using frequencies considerably outside the normal amateur bands but a decent general-coverage receiver or an SDR that can tune shortwave bands.

In the very early days of radios everyone thought that low frequencies would work best because they'd follow the curve of the Earth, and "short wave" signals which could only go in straightish lines wouldn't be able to go beyond the horizon, they'd just radiate off into space. But once it was possible to generate reasonable amounts of power and have half-decent receivers something quite surprising became clear - the signals went off into space and then *bounced off something* and came back down hundreds of miles away! The way this works is somewhat predictable, and lower frequencies work better at night. You can find this out for yourself if you play with an AM radio during the day when there's not much on, and then try again at night when the band is absolutely jumping with signals.

The frequencies used kind of point to just hammering a big earth stake in for the receiver, and dangling a longish (maybe 10-20m) wire across your garden or something similar, for receiving them.

It’s nice that autistic people have hobbies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com