Installing a WSPR Receiver in Inuvik, NWT

I recently set up a Weak Signal Propogation Reporter receiver in the town of Inuvik, NWT. I was there in the beginning of June 2022, just as the world was opening back up from the COVID-19 travel restrictions.

I thought Inuvik would be an interesting place, as it's at 68 degrees North latitude, which is above the Arctic Circle. During the summer, the sun never sets from May 25th to July 19th. In the winter, the sun doesn't rise from Dec 6th to Jan 5th. But the sun does get close enough to the horizon to have civil twilight, where the sun is less than 6 degrees below the horizon, so it's not completely dark all the time in the winter.

From an RF perspective, I thought this would be a really interesting location for several reasons. What happens to HF propagation when the D layer is always present? Would 20 meters be alive all summer long? Conversely, what happens in the winter when it's only the E and F layers?

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Inuvik Radiosonde Launch

Now that the pandemic has tapered off a bit, I took another short trip up to Inuvik, NWT. While I was up there, I visited the Environment Canada Weather Station, and participated in a radiosonde launch.

The big news out of Inuvik during this trip was that the road from the airport to the town has been paved! The road is much smoother, and I don't need to worry about windshield cracks every time a big truck passes.

Since my 2016 visit, the site has been upgraded with modern equipment. The old Electrolyser Corporation hydrogen generator was replaced with a Proton Hogen unit, all housed in a modern building with explosion-proof light switches, electrical outlets, etc.

I arrived just before the Midnight UTC launch, and Chris already had the balloon inflated and was working on the radiosonde transmitter. As I saw in Newfoundland, Canada has transitioned to the Graw DFM-09 radiosonde.

To my surprise, he actually let me release this radiosonde. This was my first radiosonde release, and it's very similar to a bursting HAB release. One interesting aspect of ...

Radiosonde Launch from Inuvik, NWT

In September 2016 I visited the Environment Canada Weather Station in Inuvik, NWT. I arrived just as they were preparing for the 2300z weather balloon launch, and they let me hang around and take some pictures.

Every twelve hours around the globe, approximatley 800 radiosondes are launched. These weather balloons record temperature, pressure, humidity, and location from the surface all the way up to 100k feet, or higher. These measurement are fed into weather models for long-term weather forecasting. These launches happen worldwide at 1100 and 2300 UTC, which gives the balloon enough time to be up at altitude around noon and midnight UTC.

This is the Vaisala RS92-SGPD radiosonde, which measures location, pressure, temperature, and humidity as the balloon ascends. The helix antenna in the upper right is for GPS, and the silver strip below that has two temp sensors and a humidity sensor. The 402.7 MHz wire antenna is on the bottom of the unit, on the left side. The 200 ft of string on the spool attaches to the balloon.

The balloon is filled with locally-generated ...

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