Fostering Collaborations with the Amateur Radio Community

Abstract

The amateur radio community is a global, highly engaged, and technical community with an intense interest in space weather, its underlying physics, and how it impacts radio communications. Over the past century, the amateur radio community has made significant contributions to ionospheric, space, and atmospheric science and it continues to innovate and contribute today. This community is ideally suited to collaborate with professional heliophysics researchers. In this white paper, we make recommendations to foster and further develop this relationship for community benefit. Our recommendations are based on experience with the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation organization (HamSCI, hamsci.org), a citizen science project established in 2015 for this purpose. We recommend allocating resources for amateur radio citizen science research projects and activities, developing amateur radio research and educational activities in collaboration with leading organizations within the amateur radio community, facilitating communication and collegiality between professional researchers and amateurs, and ensuring that proposed projects are of a mutual benefit to both the professional research and amateur radio communities.