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Santo Tomas Church, Chichicastenango, Guatemala (by Lucía García González via Wikimedia Commons)
Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part Five) – Visiting Nahualá
More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer[SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.
After my first attempt to visit La Voz de Atitlán failed in June 1983, I turned my sights northward. The next morning in Panajachel I boarded a bus bound for Guatemala City but got off when the bus reached the main highway at the Los Encuentros intersection. A few minutes later I caught a ride on a ‘chicken bus’ headed north to my first destination of the day – Chichicastenango.
Chichicastenango is not a town that DXers would be familiar with but anyone who has seriously traveled around Guatemala has surely been there at least once. The outdoor markets held on Thursday and Sunday are among the largest in all of Central America. Guatemala has dozens of towns with long names ending in …tenango, meaning “place of.” Chichicastenango is the place of the chichicaste plant, in reference to a thorny bush that grows in the area. Most of the time people just call the town Chichi as it’s common to drop the tenango part from names when speaking.
For over five hundred years, Quiché Mayans from the surrounding area have been coming here twice weekly for the market held in the plaza in front of the Santo Tomás church. The steps to the church are always filled with flower vendors and men swinging containers of incense.
In the early days of the Spanish conquest, Catholic churches were often built on the sites already holy to the Indians. It was a clever way to get the newly forced converts to come to mass. In the case of Santo Tomás, however, they unknowingly picked a location of major spiritual importance in the Mayan religion. As a result many Mayan ceremonies involving nature and natural gods have survived in this area. Some became intertwined with Catholic practices while others were practiced in secret for centuries until it finally became safe to bring them out into the open again.
It was only June but I did my Christmas shopping that day and mailed everything home from Guatemala City a few days later. Guatemala’s post office was very reliable. Everything arrived safely in less than two weeks.
On to Nahualá
With my purchases packed in my now very heavy bag, I got on the next bus heading south and once again got out at Los Encuentros. This time I was looking for any bus heading west. I wasn’t going too far. A few minutes later a bus bound for Quetzaltenango stopped and I got on, telling the driver’s assistant that I wanted to get off at Nahualá.
I knew Nahualá was in the northwest corner of Sololá department a little way off the Pan-American Highway but I was surprised when about an hour later the bus stopped next to a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. I gave the driver’s assistant a puzzled look when he told me this was my stop. He explained that they could leave me off further down the highway where the road to Nahualá branched off. But it would be a long walk from there. From here, the walk was only about ten minutes. There was a well-worn path leading upwards through the cornfield, so I took him at his word. Continue reading →
Lago de Atitlán con el pueblo de Panajachel de fondo (Photo by Larissa Gomez via Wikimedia Commons)
Don Moore’s Photo Album:
Guatemala (Part Four) – To the Western Highlands
More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer[SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.
If anyone deserves recognition as the first tourists to visit western Guatemala it would be the American John Lloyd Stephens and Englishman Frederick Catherwood. In the 1820s and 1830s, Stephens traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East and published several books about his journeys. On one of those trips he met Catherwood, an accomplished artist who traveled around the Mediterranean making drawings of archaeological sites.
The pair decided to visit Central America after coming across accounts of ruins in the region by the Honduran explorer Juan Galindo. Their trip received official support when U.S. President Martin van Buren appointed Stephens as a special ambassador to Central America. The two men wandered the region for several months in 1839-40 visiting known Mayan sites and rediscovering many others. Stephens wrote two books about their travels, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán while Catherwood published a book of his drawings, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. All three books became immediate bestsellers.
Frederick Catherwood’s 1840 lithograph of the central plaza in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.
The three books introduced the Mayan civilization to the rest of the world for the first time, bringing new visitors to the region. Some came to do serious research. Others were just curious adventurers. But the numbers that came were small as only a few wealthy people had the time and money to journey to exotic places.
Then the 1960s brought a new kind of tourist – the hippie. Many young people in Europe and North America saw flaws in the materialism of their own societies and became interested in experiencing non-western cultures. The Mayan region of Guatemala was a perfect destination. It was exotic, relatively easy to get to, and cheap.
That qualification of cheap was especially important. The hippies weren’t big spenders staying in classy hotels and eating at pricey restaurants. They found rooms in basic hospedajes and ate everyday local food cooked by indigenous women at roadside comedores. In many ways that was better. The money went directly to local working people instead of to the wealthy owners of fancy establishments.
The 1960s and 1970s became the era of hippie tourism in Guatemala. Most of visitors went to the area around Lake Atitlán, drawn by the lake’s natural beauty and the region’s year-round springlike climate. The epicenter of it all was the little lakeshore village of Panajachel.
Clouds of War
To anyone wandering the shoreline of Lake Atitlán in the mid-1970s, Guatemala seemed to be a peaceful place. In reality, a guerilla war was raging just a hundred kilometers away. In 1954, a CIA-sponsored coup overthrew Guatemala’s elected government and ushered in a long period of repressive military regimes. With the military showing no signs of relinquishing power, around 1965 a few leftist activists went into the remote mountains of northern Huehuetenango and Quiché departments with hopes of repeating Fidel Castro’s success in Cuba.
By all appearances, this should have been a minor footnote in Guatemala’s history. The would-be revolutionaries, after all, were city people without the skills to survive in the remote mountain highlands. But they recruited a few Mayans to their movement and then a few more until the Mayans dominated the guerilla movement. Yet the Mayans were never guided by ideology. The guerilla movement was a way of fighting back against centuries of repression, discrimination, and poverty. As one observer put it, “They’re Communists because of their stomachs, not because of their heads.”
As the guerilla movement grew the combat zone gradually moved south and into other regions. And the war became less a political revolution than an ethnic conflict. The military was dominated by Spanish-speaking ladinos who knew nothing of Mayan culture or the Mayan languages. All Mayans were seen as potential enemies, as was anyone who attempted to improve the Mayans’ lives. That lead to the formation of military-run death squads which targeted small town mayors, teachers, social workers, church leaders, and anyone else who dared to speak up. By 1981 over two hundred non-combatants were being kidnapped, killed, and dumped by the side of the road every month.
In 1976 the Lake Atitlán region had been seen as a peaceful place. A few years later the combination of active military death squads in the villages along the lake and a widening guerilla war elsewhere had put an end to that image. The era of hippie tourism in Guatemala was over. Continue reading →
Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part One) – The East
by Don Moore
More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer[SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.
I’ve wanted to do a feature on Guatemala ever since starting this series a few years ago. From a cultural perspective it’s one of the most fascinating countries in Latin America. About half the population are indigenous, primarily Mayan, and most of them still speak their own languages. For several decades Guatemala’s religious broadcasters – Roman Catholic and Evangelical Protestant – used many of those languages on shortwave where we DXers were able to hear them.
I made five visits to Guatemala from 1982 to 1984 while in the Peace Corps in Honduras and returned in December 1987 while in graduate school. I spent enough time in Guatemala that there’s an entire section of my Vagabond DXer book filled with stories of my travels and station visits. In this seven-part series you get to see the pictures.
The map below shows the country, minus the sparsely populated northern department of Petén. We’re going to start in the least interesting part of Guatemala, the east. There’s very little indigenous culture left in that region nor much else of interest to the visitor. But you do have to pass through it to get from Honduras to the rest of Guatemala … and there were some radio stations to visit.
The main border crossing between Honduras and Guatemala has always been near Esquipulas in southern Chiquimula department. (That’s where the header photo comes from). But about 40 kilometers to the north is a secondary crossing near the town of Jocotán. In the 1980s, the road was rough and unpaved and the best mode of transportation was hitching a ride in the back of a passing pickup truck. The border consisted of just two wooden shacks, one on each side, minded by bored soldiers. That’s where I entered Guatemala on my second visit in June 1983. Jocotán had a radio station that I wanted to visit.
Eastern Guatemala may not have had much of interest, but the large Mayan ruins of Copán are just across the border in Honduras. The most direct route there from Guatemala City is via Jocotán so typically a few backpackers pass through town every day. I found a room at the Pension Ramirez. At $1.50 a night it was the perfect place for Peace Corps Volunteers, backpackers, and others at the very bottom end of the budget travel scale. I got a bed with sheets that may have been washed within the past week, a table, a chair, and a dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The shared bathroom was down the hall. Cold water only. But the Pension Ramirez had one thing that I never encountered at any other such lodging. The owner had a business card.
Jocotán was home to Radio Chortís, a Roman Catholic broadcaster that mostly ministered to the Chortí Indians who lives in the region. As most of the Chortí had assimilated into the dominant Spanish culture the station primarily broadcast in Spanish with just a few hours in the Chortí language each week. Radio Chortís used to put a strong signal into North America on 3380 kHz. The station was part of a mission funded by donations from Belgian and West German Catholics. The studios and offices were in a large complex that also included vocational training facilities and a print shop for the church. That explained why the back of their QSL letters always had a colorful station graphic.
Radio Chortís, 3380 kHz, as heard in Pennsylvania 30 December 1979 at 1152 UTC:
On to Cobán
Early the next morning, I took a bus to Chiquimula, the departmental capital. DXers may recognize the town as the location of Radio Verdad, the last active shortwave broadcast station in Central America. It came on the air long after my time there so I never got to visit the station. In Chiquimula I switched to a bus bound for Guatemala City, but that wasn’t my final destination. I got off at a little crossroads just before the town of El Progreso and then boarded the next bus heading north to Cobán, capital of Alta Verapaz.
In Cobán I planned to visit another Catholic broadcaster, but one with a rather unusual name for a religious station. In the 1520s, the Spanish conquistadores quickly overran most of Guatemala but the Kekchi Indians in their mountainous homeland proved impossible to defeat. The Spanish dubbed the region Tezulutlán from an archaic Spanish phrase that meant “Land of War.”
In the 1540s, the Spanish tried another method to subdue the region, this time allowing Dominican friars under Bartolomé de las Casas to attempt to convert the Kekchi to Catholicism. Where the soldiers had failed the padres succeeded and the newly pacified region was renamed Verapaz, or Land of True Peace. Bartolomé de las Casas was a good man who left a legacy of trying to protect the rights of the Indians in a time of brutal conquest. But he was just one man in a time of boundless greed. He left the region a few years later and the Kekchi were forced into peonage just as the Mayans elsewhere in Guatemala had been.
And so four centuries later when the Roman Catholic diocese in Verapaz, the land of true peace, set up a radio station they named it Radio Tezulutlán, after the land of war. Someone had a keen sense of irony. But maybe there is something symbolic there as well. The Kekchi, after all, have survived as a people with their own language intact. Today they number over half-a-million, or almost eight percent of the Guatemalan people. That Radio Tezulutlán broadcasts primarily in Kekchi, not Spanish, might just be a final victory for the Kekchi.
The next few pictures show the Radio Tezulutlán building and studio from 1983 and the QSL card and pennant that I picked up on my visit. The QSL was for their little-used frequency of 3370 kHz. They mostly used 4835 kHz.
Radio Tezulutlán, 4835 kHz, as heard in Pennsylvania on 24 December 1979 at 1153 UTC:
More Broadcasters in Verapaz
In Santa Bárbara, Honduras, where I was living in 1983, one of the best heard Guatemalan medium wave stations was Cobán’s Radio Norte on 680 kHz. I stopped by in the evening hoping to pick up a QSL but the only person there was a lone announcer who was too busy to help me. I may not have gotten the QSL but I did pick up something that I’ve since come to see as even more valuable.
In my book, I explain how one of the primary sources of income for small town radio stations in that era was reading personal announcements and greetings on the air. The Radio Norte announcer had a stack of forms that listeners had filled out with messages to be read on the air. He was throwing away some that had already been read, so I took one.
The form could be either mailed to the station or hand-delivered, as this one apparently was. The message is a birthday greeting from Imelda to her son Mario Agusto. At the top, the date the message is to be read is listed and the place is listed as San Juan Chamelco. This is important as the announcer would first say something like “Atención! San Juan Chamelco!” to get the attention of listeners in that town. At the bottom are instructions as to when the announcement should be read – the 18:30 marimba music show. The form is a very unique radio station souvenir. I only wish I had taken the entire pile out of the trashcan.
Radio Norte, 680 kHz, recorded in Cobán during my June 1983 visit:
I also made a side trip to the neighboring town of San Pedro Carchá where I got a sort-of-QSL from Radio Imperial on 925 kHz. If you’ve read my book you know that a picture of the secretary would be a lot more interesting than this one of the front door.
A New Shortwave Station
For thirteen years the Roman Catholic church and Radio Tezulutlán had the Kekchi language airwaves all to themselves. But Evangelical Protestantism had been gaining ground in Guatemala for several decades and in 1988 the Evangelical station Radio Kekchi began broadcasting on the shortwave frequency of 4845 kHz. Radio Kekchi must have had friends at the Ministry of Communication as that assigned frequency was just 10 kHz above Radio Tezulutlán’s 4835 kHz. That certainly made it easier to poach listeners from the competition.
In one more bit of strangeness, Radio Kekchi was located sixty-five kilometers northeast of Cobán in the town of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. So the Evangelical radio station was put in a place named after the priest who originally converted the Kekchi to Catholicism. Maybe the region should be renamed The Land of Irony.
Radio Kekchí, 4845 kHz, as heard in Ohio on 5 September 1988:
Language or Dialect?
In much of the common literature about Guatemala it says that the indigenous people speak Mayan dialects. And back in the day when these stations were active on shortwave, DXers’ loggings often referred to hearing Mayan dialects. But I called Chortí and Kekchi languages, not dialects. What’s the difference?
Linguistically, a dialect is a regional variation of a language. The different dialects of a language are always mutually intelligible. American and Britons speak different dialects of English but have no trouble understanding one another except for the occasional confusion over a word or phrase. Speakers of Spanish and Portuguese can understand one another a little bit but not enough to have a real conversation. Those are distinct languages.
On the other hand, Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes have no trouble carrying on a conversation with each speaking their own language. That’s because linguistically they are speaking dialects of the same language. So why are Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish considered different languages? Linguist Max Weinrich once explained “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” He might have added an economy, a government, and international respect.
Languages spoken by people who are held in low prestige are often called dialects not for any linguistic reason but simply out of prejudice. It’s a subtle way of indicating these people and their culture are of less importance. This is true not only of Guatemala’s indigenous languages but of many others around the world. Chortí, Kekchi, Quiché, Cakchiquel, and all the other two dozen indigenous languages of Guatemala are just as distinct from one another as are Spanish, French, and Italian. So show them some respect. Call them languages, not dialects.
A DX Oddity
Let’s end part one of this series with an unusual bit of radio history. Aeronautical beacons are stations that broadcast a short morse code identifier over and over. Pilots use them for direction finding in lining up with the runway during bad weather. Today these are only found in the longwave band but there used to be a handful of Latin American beacons on frequencies just above the old top of the medium wave band. One of those was RAB on 1613 kHz at Rabinal, about 45 kilometers south of Cobán. It used to be an easy catch all over North America, but here’s a recording I made of it in nearby Honduras.
Beacon RAB, 1613 kHz, as heard in Santa Bárbara, Honduras, on 12 November 1982 at 0508 UTC:
The Sociolinguistics of Guatemalan Indian Languages and the Effect on Radio Broadcasting is a paper I wrote in 1989 while doing my M.A. in Applied Linguistics at Ohio University.
Learning should be a life-long pursuit for all of us. One of my ways of doing that is by visiting museums while traveling, whether in the USA or abroad. Cultural, historical, and science museums are my favorites. And if a museum’s theme includes the 20th century, there is a good chance that something related to radio will be found in the collection. In this edition of the Photo Album I want to share some findings related to radio and World War II that I’ve recently found in museums here in the USA.
Do A-Bombs QSL?
I’m based in Pennsylvania but my daughter lives in western Colorado and my son in Texas. So in September and October of 2024 I made a 45-day road trip to visit them both and see sites along the way. One stop was Santa Fe, New Mexico. The New Mexico History Museum downtown has an excellent exhibit on the development of the Atomic Bomb and the effect on the local area. The real place to learn about this, however, is an hour north of the city at Los Alamos, where the project actually happened.
In addition to the historical sites, Los Alamos has one of the best science museums I’ve been to anywhere. That’s not surprising considering that not many places have as many scientists per capita as Los Alamos does. And there I learned that radio was closely involved in dropping the first A-Bomb on Hiroshima.
The scientists at Los Alamos developed two types of atomic bombs. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima used a uranium-gun to initiate the explosion. The scientists were certain this would work so this was not tested beforehand. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki used the second method with a with a plutonium-implosion as the trigger. But they were uncertain as to whether or not this would actually work so it had already been tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. That was the first atomic explosion and the scientists collected lots of useful measurements.
But the developers had no such measurements for the uranium-gun bomb as it hadn’t been tested. But how to get them? They obviously couldn’t place monitors on the ground at Hiroshima beforehand. Physicist Luis Alvarez was tasked with finding a solution. Alvarez’s team built three canisters filled with monitoring equipment and VHF transmitters to be carried by The Great Artiste, the observation plane that would accompany the Enola Gay to Hiroshima. The three canisters were to be dropped by parachute at the same moment that the Enola Gay dropped the bomb.
The signals from the canisters were to be picked up by a bank of Hallicrafters S-36 VHF receivers on the plane and then feed to oscillographs to record the results, which would simultaneously be recorded by movie cameras.
It all worked according to plan and data was received from two of the three canisters before they were engulfed by the explosion. But, to the best of my knowledge, no QSLs were issued for the receptions.
The WASP Museum
My next destination after Santa Fe was San Antonio, Texas, 700 miles (1100 kilometers) away. To make the road trip more interesting I wanted to find some things to see along the way. While perusing Google Maps I came across the National WASP World War II Museum in Sweetwater, Texas. The museum has nothing to do with insects. The acronym stands for Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.
The use of women pilots in support roles to the US Army Air Force began in 1942 with the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) and Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). In 1943 the two programs were merged to form the WASP program and the airfield at Sweetwater was chosen for the four-month training program. In total, 1,830 women started WASP training and 1,074 finished, about the same success rate as with male military pilots of the era. Continue reading →
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Carlos Latuff, who shares the following guest post:
Exploring Radio Radio Nikkei
by Carlos Latuff
It’s been a while since I listened to Nikkei Radio, a Japanese commercial broadcaster that operates on shortwave for a domestic audience. If I remember well, the signal was very weak and, since I don’t speak Japanese, I didn’t know what the content of its broadcasts was about. But today, with the possibility of recording the audio, transcribing it and translating it, it has become more interesting to follow its programs on shortwave here in Brazil, more specifically in Porto Alegre (distance between Nikkei’s transmitter in Chiba, Japan, and Porto Alegre, Brazil: 18779 km).
Nikkei Radio 1 was founded in 1954 and Nikkei 2 in 1963, and at the time it was called Nihon Shortwave Broadcasting Co., better known by the acronym “NSB”. Some Japanese electronics manufacturers have in the past released receivers dedicated to receiving the signal from these stations (see below).
Today, the Japanese company Audiocomm has radio models whose packaging states that this receiver is compatible with Nikkei Radio; note the image alluding to horse racing (see below).
I haven’t been able to acquire any of these devices (yet), since they were basically produced for the Japanese public. But any receiver with shortwave bands can tune into Radio Nikkei. I use my good old XHDATA D-808 with a long wire antenna. In Porto Alegre, the best propagation is between 08:45 AM and 06:15 AM (UTC). In the late afternoon, the signal also arrives, but with a fair amount of static.
Both Radio Nikkei 1 and Radio Nikkei 2 operate on the following frequencies:
Radio Nikkei 1:
3.925 MHz (in case of emergency)
6.055 MHz
9.595 MHz (in case of emergency)
Radio Nikkei 2:
3.945 MHz (in case of emergency)
6.115 MHz
9.76 MHz: (in case of emergency)
On the station’s website https://www.radionikkei.jp/ you can find details of its programming, as well as broadcast times, including a table (in Japanese) with this information, which can be translated with the help of Google Lens.
Radio Nikkei also broadcasts its programming via streaming, however the platform used (radiko) is inaccessible to me here in Brazil (see message below).
Nikkei Radio is majority-owned by the business newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which means the station focuses mainly on the financial market. However, much of its programming, especially on weekends, is dedicated to horse racing, a popular sport in Japan. In addition to news, talk shows and music, the radio station also broadcasts evangelical preaching (!). One of these religious programs is called “True Salvation” and is sponsored by The Japan Gospel Mission, a Christian Protestant organization.
This heterogeneous mix of business, horses and Jesus Christ makes Nikkei Radio an interesting station to tune into, to say the least.
The radio listening sessions published here were made in the central Porto Alegre, Brazil, between January 15th and 19th, 2025.
(Domo arigato gozai masu Mr. Tagawa Shigeru for helping me with translation).
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Steve Allen (KZ4TN), who shares the following guest post:
SDR Signal Enhancer
by Steve Allen
I came across this HF Signal Enhancer for SDR on the RTL-SDR.com website. It was designed and built by Peter Parker, VK3YE from Melbourne, Australia. Below is the link to the video of the signal enhancer in action using an RTL-SDR V4 Software Designed Radio;
It was very easy to see and listen to the improvement to the signal reception the signal enhancer made. Having been a life-long shortwave listener and current SDR user, I had to build one.
I did a screen capture of the schematic, re-drew it using MS Word, and built the bill of materials. In Peter’s original design he included a T-R relay so you could use the SDR along with a transmitter, which I opted to leave out. I had the passive components in my “junk box” but had to source the enclosure, controls, and antenna connectors. I have used these clam shell extruded enclosures with previous projects and love the build quality and the fact that they incorporate a slot in the sides which let me insert a sheet of PCB material on which I can do the assembly.
Referring to the schematic drawing in Peter’s video, you can see that the variable capacitor “floats” above ground, which is not the usual application for these devices. To do that I mounted the vari-cap on a piece of non-plated PCB material that I cut to the width of the enclosure and it fit nicely within the slot. The vari-cap had three pins on the side of the frame that allowed me to force fit it into three holes I drilled in the PCB material. I was very careful to drill the holes undersize and then slowly open them up until the vari-cap press fit on to the board. For good measure I ran UV curing adhesive down into each hole, letting it flow all the way through before I set it with a UV light source.
I then drilled an oversized hole in the front panel for the vari-cap shaft to pass through.
I then mounted the RF gain and band switch. The next step was the assembly of the AM broadcast filter. As SDRs can be overpowered by local AM radio stations Peter choose to include an internal band pass filter that is configured for around 3.5 MHz. The intent of this filter is to attenuate the signals below 3.5 MHz. Strong AM stations will still be heard but there is much less chance of them bleeding through on the higher frequencies.
I assembled the filter on a piece of perf board and connected the component leads on the bottom. I passed leads back up through the perf board for the signal path and ground. I mounted it on the main board with a standoff.
The next step was the wiring of the inductors to the rotary switch. Simple, and I tied them to the vari-cap frame.
For the back panel I chose an SO-239 and a BNC for the antenna input, and for the radio connection an SMA and another BNC. I sanded off the coating on the enclosure at the antenna mounts as well as the four corners where the back panel screws into the top and bottom of the clam shell enclosure to provide good grounding of the enclosure. I wired the 1N4148 diodes on the antenna connectors, and attached the RG-174 coax. As Peter suggested, I grounded the long (relatively speaking) runs to and from the back panel with coax and grounded it at the back panel.
The last step was to apply a bit of epoxy adhesive to the fiberglass board and the slot it runs in to hold it in place. Once the epoxy set, I did the final wiring of the front and rear panel components. You can see how I sanded the corners of the back panel in the above photo.
I connected it to my inverted L antenna and an SDR Play RSP2 and gave it a test run. I like the fact that I can visually see the changes to the signal strength on the SDR software as well as audibly. It makes a noticeable improvement to the reception.
On Christmas Eve the Parker Solar Probe is going to enter the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time to study Solar Wind. For radio hobbists of all ilks, this will hopefully help us understand more about the origins of Solar Wind, and thereby help us understand more fully the effects this has on radio signals (and other space weather issues).
The following is an exerpt from an article on ARS Technica by Eric Berger
Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore.
Sure, the spacecraft got some attention when it launched. It is, after all, the fastest moving object that humans have ever built. At its maximum speed, goosed by the gravitational pull of the Sun, the probe reaches a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent the speed of light. That kind of speed would get you from New York City to Tokyo in less than a minute.
And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. At the time of its launch, in August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years old.
But in the six years since the probe has been zipping through outer space and flying by the Sun? Not so much. Let’s face it, the astrophysical properties of the Sun and its complicated structure are not something that most people think about on a daily basis.
However, the smallish probe—it masses less than a metric ton, and its scientific payload is only about 110 pounds (50 kg)—is about to make its star turn. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun. It will come within just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the solar surface, flying into the solar atmosphere for the first time.
