My last blog post (from two months ago, sorry about that) detailed my participation in the worldwide Hi Juno event; a coordinated effort from amateur radio operators from around the world to send a very slow speed Morse Code signal (HI, to be exact…DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT DIT-DIT) to the Juno spacecraft as it slingshotted around Earth on it’s way out to Jupiter.

After the attempt, the Juno science team promised an update to let us know how the experiment turned out, but was very quiet over the last few months. Worse, was news that Juno had tripped into safe mode during the Earth flyby. There was a decent chance that no usable data from this experiment would be recovered. Suddenly, yesterday on 9 December 2013, there was a press release announcing that there would be a presentation on the results of the Juno Earth flyby, including results from the Hi Juno experiment, and that this presentation would be streamed online. This morning at 10:30 AM, I eagerly connected to the livestream to see what they would announce.

In short: we did it! As you can see in the spectrogram above, our signals were detected by the Juno spacecraft in a couple of different time slots. The green dits are the signals that were actually detected by Juno, while the gray ones are anticipated signals which were not detected. One thing is slightly misleading about the spectrogram, as it appears that our actual signals are not depicted in it. I’m not sure why that is, but I imagine it is for clarity in public outreach. Still, as a ham, I would love to see the spectrogram without the overlay of the expected data. One other thing that is interesting is the streaky lines in the upper right-hand corner. It is said that these are terrestrial SW broadcasters.

The Waves instrument primary investigator said that there were at least 1400 hams who participated in the experiment (I assume that is based on the number of QSL requests sent through their email address). If you assume that each was running a barefoot commercial rig (I was, but had it dialed back to 50 W just to go easy on the finals), it’s not hard to imagine that collectively we put around 100 kW of 28 MHz RF out there for a few hours.

Perhaps this stuff is too obscure for the average person to care about, but in my view this is one of the most inspiring and amazing things I’ve done in amateur radio. You can see a bit of my raw reactions from Twitter below:

I declare Hi Juno to be the greatest QRSS experiment of all time #hamradio

— Jason Milldrum (@NT7S) December 10, 2013

Seriously, the Hi Juno experiment is one of the neatest things I've ever seen in amateur radio. So happy it worked and that I participated.

— Jason Milldrum (@NT7S) December 10, 2013

It’s pretty rare for a space agency to reach out to the public at-large for active participation in a spacecraft science experiment. The fact that we were able to pool together and successfully transmit a signal to space probe whipping around the Earth at very high velocities just boggles my mind. I also have to give a huge huzzah to the team who created the public outreach website for Hi Juno. It was top-notch and did a perfect job in coordinating all of us hams around the world. I hope that the success of the Hi Juno experiment will encourage science teams to consider similar future efforts when possible.

It does seem that the Hi Juno experiment had quite an impact on the science team, as it inspired them to create a short documentary about the event and the results, which you can see below. It’s very well produced and exciting to watch. There is also a shorter video which just shows a depiction of reception of the Hi Juno signal. Now I just need to wait for my Juno QSL to arrive…

UPDATE: Here’s a press release about Hi Juno from the mission page.