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Credits

This project exists because of the amateur radio community. Every observation in our dataset — 13.18 billion and counting — was generated by a ham radio operator somewhere in the world, running a beacon, making a contact, or submitting a log. Without them, there is no data. Without the data, there is no IONIS.

To every amateur radio operator who has ever transmitted a WSPR beacon, worked a contest, appeared on the Reverse Beacon Network, or shown up on PSK Reporter: thank you.

Data Sources

  • Joe Taylor, K1JT — Creator of WSPR, WSJT, WSJT-X, and MAP65. Nobel Laureate (Physics, 1993). The WSPR protocol and software that generates the observations we study are his contributions to amateur radio.
  • WSPRNet (wsprnet.org) — The community-operated database that collects and archives WSPR spot reports from operators worldwide.
  • Reverse Beacon Network (reversebeacon.net) — N4ZR, PY1NB, VE3NEA, and the global network of CW/RTTY skimmer operators who contribute spots.
  • PSK Reporter (pskreporter.info) — Created and operated by Philip Gladstone, N1DQ. The largest real-time amateur radio reception report network, with 27,000+ active monitors contributing millions of FT8/FT4/WSPR spots daily. The MQTT real-time feed that powers our pskr-collector is provided by Tom Sevart, M0LTE — making the full firehose of reception data available to the community.
  • CQ Contest Logs — World Wide Radio Operators Foundation (WWROF)
  • ARRL Contest Logs — American Radio Relay League
  • GFZ Potsdam — Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, German Research Centre for Geosciences. Solar and geomagnetic indices (SSN, SFI, Kp).

Giving Back

When we publish results, we share our findings with the data providers and the amateur radio community — including the RBN community, who have asked that researchers share their analysis back. We are happy to do so.