Automatic monitoring of Tropospheric propagation phenomena

To distinct radio amateur, and professional, one can look at how these two groups consider the contact success probability. An amateur is happy if the contact is possible for a few minutes during the year, a professional is grudgingly happy, if the contact fails only for a few minutes during a year.

Continuous monitoring of tropospheric propagation in UHF/SHF/EHF bands

Usually people claim, that there are very few (tropo) propagation opportunities at the microwave bands. This project aims to supply a definitive answer, and provide a near-realtime public propagation monitoring for anybody to look at.

Varying ways to collect the data

• Monitor a few beacons at multiple receiver sites
  • Special purpose beacons
  • Monitoring various continuously running transmitters: Radars, FM-stations, etc.
• Collecting telemetry data from various microwave link span receiver AGC's.
  • Requires co-operation with link operator's
  • Data collector system is a software module/separate small computer sending only the wanted subset of link telemetry to central collector/combiner system at Viestikallio.
  • Data security is paramount to everybody. We shall show to operators (by source code, if necessary) that the data collector will not endanger link management system functionality, nor its safety/integrity.

As a result, the system would produce maps which show tropo phenomena occurrence at some measurement spans, and long-term statistics graphs (like "meteo" on left menu) showing link-span time variations.