The August 2026 QST features some great material about HamSCI, including some nice mentions of Turn Island Systems gear and a brief section (written by me) highlighting the Time Of Flight measurement developments from Turn Island Systems and others.
The cover photo is of the Neumayer Station III in Antarctica, which hosts SDR receivers running wsprdaemon, and also a TIS WSPRsonde 8-channel transmitter.
I was wearing three hats at the 2026 Dayton Hamvention (actually in Xenia, OH): Turn Island Systems, TAPR, and HamSCI– a very busy weekend. So busy that I only took this one picture (we were just beginning to set up):
Lots of folks stopped by to see what we had going on, to ask questions, and to just chat. My voice dropped one octave over the course of the event and I enjoyed every minute of it!
On Friday TAPR held a lecture session and I gave a presentation on the Time of Flight work being done using tools from Turn Island Systems, TAPR, wsprdaemon, and HamSCI. Also in my presentation was a brief introduction to a new SDR receiver, based on the RX-888, we are doing at TAPR. Video of my presentation may surface some day, but here are the slides from it:
By the way, the TIS-TS1 TimeSync I’ve been working on and describing here is now available for sale. The prototypes have been deployed and tested with good results, and production run units look great. It’s pretty specialized, but if you need one you can now get it here on the TIS website:
Here is my Time of Flight presentation, where I describe the addition of the time domain to the suite of precision measurements delivered by the wsprdaemon system. The following two videos are of the same presentation (because I like redundancy for fault-tolerance):
Discussing the TAPRX-888 SDR design — This is a TAPR project that I am working on, creating the schematic and layout package for a true open-source SDR:
More presentations from the HamSCI 2026 Workshop:
https://www.youtube.com/@ARRLHQ
Upcoming: Hamvention 2026 — I will be presenting an update on the Time of Flight systems, including details on the implementation of a time-stamped transmit beacon. If you miss the presentation, please stop the TAPR and HamSCI tables and say hello!
Here’s a preview of a product in development, designed to add Time of Arrival and Time of Flight measurement capability to the RX-888 SDR as used in the wsprdaemon network:
Yes, it’s another Blue Box from Turn Island Systems. This “TS1” generates a carrier signal modulated by the Pulse per Second output of a GPS receiver module, and sends it to the HF input of the RX-888:
With the TS1 and using an enhanced version of ka9q-radio software we have been able to measure the Time of Arrival of (for example) WWV transmissions with microsecond accuracy. A prototype of this unit has been running at the Boulder Colorado WW0WWV site (located on the grounds of the WWV transmitters), and the version shown above at the KPH receiver site on the Point Reyes peninsula in northern California.
We expect that this new measurement capability will be very useful in the development and evaluation of propagation models.
This is a work in progress, but look here if you would like to see some early documentation:
I gave a presentation on this topic at the 2026 HamSCI workshop (March 14-15):
The presentations will be available (probably before the Dayton Hamvention in May), see the HamSCI website for details.
Here is my presentation in pdf format: