Citizen science: Development of a low-cost magnetometer system for a coordinated space weather monitoring.

As part of Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) Personal Space Weather Station (PSWS) project, a low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf magnetometer has been developed to provide quantitative and qualitative measurements of the geospace environment from the ground for both scientific and operational purposes at a cost that will allow for crowd-sourced data contributions. The PSWS magnetometers employ a magneto-inductive sensor technology to record three-axis magnetic field variations with a field resolution of 3 nT at a 1 Hz sample rate. The measurement range of the sensor is nT) and is valid over a temperature range of -40 °C to +85 °C.

Grape Version 1: First prototype of the low-cost personal space weather station receiver.

Crowd sourced data collection among the international community of amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners has great potential for addressing problems of under-sampling in the geospace system. Quantitative Doppler measurements of high frequency (HF) time standard stations, used in bottom side ionospheric sensing, have been accomplished using existing radio hardware belonging to volunteers in distributed campaigns. However, typical shortwave receivers cannot be put to ordinary use while these measurements are being taken, do not have standardized signal chains, and are generally too expensive to be purchased for the sole purpose of taking Doppler measurements.