Rob presents his working paper on remote sensing of aircraft in the Southern Hemisphere by using WSPR at open sea without surveillance radar and ADS-B location, demonstrated using four different cases.
Rob asks 4 key questions in his paper and provides the answers:
- Is it possible to detect an aircraft over thousands of km with WSPR?
- Is it possible to detect forward scattering over thousands of km?
- Is it possible to detect scattering along the long path (LP)?
- Is it possible to detect and track-while-detect just using secondary WSPR data?
He concludes we can use WSPRnet secondary data for the search of aircraft such as MH370 over great distances.
You can download the paper here
One test is worth a thousand expert opinions!
Why not charter an similar aircraft, put it on a similar flight path and have Richard show where it was. So simple, so fast, so cheap to do!
Mike Bee
@Mike Bee,
Welcome to the blog!
Your idea has been proposed before.
Some people will say the data has been faked. They claim the Inmarsat satellite data was faked, the co-pilot’s mobile phone detection over Penang was faked, the 36 items of MH370 floating debris was planted, …
Some people will not believe it even when the physical evidence of the wreckage has been found.
@Richard
I am curious if you have any sense for what might be driving the harshest of the assaults on your work. The technical criticisms are to be expected and are, of course, even essential to the mission. But there seems to be a non-zero number of people who want the mission to fail… you posted something about phoney technical critiques from folks pretending to be qualified to do so. Is it just internet trolls with nothing better to do? Jealous hams? Seems unlikely to affect the ultimate outcome, unless there is more to it than is seen here.
Thank you
73
Kent
@Kent,
The police investigation is ongoing and they have asked me not to speak about the details of their investigation publicly.
Richard,
Thank you for the work you do, I hope you know many families around the world are very grateful. My question is regarding the physical search of the plane’s remains. Is there any search or funding underway to dive for this plane in the location you marked in a previous post? I’d like to know when we could finally find the answer to this case. Thank you for your time.
Best,
Bailey Colbert
@Bailey Colbert,
Ocean Infinity have announced a proposal to search again in 2023.
I am very curious to the determination of final RF powers when no consideration of transmitter antenna or receive antenna gain has been included. The total reliability upon “frequency drift” as a sign of reflection from aircraft does not consider actual ionospheric conditions along a signal path with several reflection points all of which will have differing refraction capabilities coupled of course to varying ground reflection conditions I.e sea/land. Use of OTHR co-channel signals do not consider the signal properties which are totally different to WSPR and can hardly be used in the same image or signal analysis. As far as I can tell if I transmit to a station in Queensland and vice versa and we see WSPR frequency shifts and ignore equipment/propagation variations we should consider we are simply seeing aircraft going in and out of Sydney. In other analysis provided within these pages I see the application of the Radar equation and if correctly used would clearly demonstrate the need of significant RF powers and high gain antennas a knowledge of the exact propagation conditions etc etc. I will continue to read further analysis but presently doubt the results. With regards
@John Gilbert
The “final RF powers” and “antenna gain” are of little importance as the fact is that they were “adequate” for the links to exist at the time as reported in the WSPRnet database. The process to detect and track MH370 is based on the post-processing of existing data to identify anomalies and outliers, and then to use these outliers in conjunction with other data sources (e.g. the performance parameters of a 777-200ER, the amount of fuel onboard, radar data where available, the recovered wreckage, drift analyses, Inmarsat data, etc.) to determine the most likely flightpath of and the final resting place of MH370. It is a multiprong process and it is recommended that the previously published technical papers be studied in detail. Although not rocket science, the process is still comprehensive and will probably not be fully grasped by merely glancing through the provided technical material.
Regards
Hannes
I have only just started to become aquainted with this fascinating subject of aircraft detection with fixed frequency and fixed stations RF path over long distances, after watching the TV programmes recently of the tragic MH370 flight. It has stimulated me to look more into the technicalities of Richard Godfrey’s amazing analysis and reports. The work (and effort involved) he has done is astonishing.
It sounds similar to me, or related in principle, to work described to me by my friend Peter Martinez G3PLX with his interest in ionospheric research, and his work on ‘dopplergrams’ he produced with his own designed software and DSP Tx/Rx; working with very narrow bandwidths indeed achievable with (his own designed) GPS-locked local osc of the DSP Tx/Rx. His work was presented in papers submitted to the RSGB some years go.
Though he could use his own transmitter, and did reasearch work that way, he also used fixed ground stations (eg. Inskip near I think Preston), and with his ‘dopplergrams’ could observe and produce ionospheric reflection Vs height layer changes as “waterfall” graphs over time.
Included in his dopplergrams always were the flight paths of aircraft from Manchester and other flight paths from airports in the UK.
Though this was using a transmiter he was also able to track flights of other aircraft at much greater ranges in principle. He could also use his own transmitted signal and produce dopplergrams which presumably could give an OTH capability – but *only required small transmitted power levels*. I rememebr he said it was quite possible to send a pulse and observe the return pulses from one or two total global paths with only a matter of milliwatts ! The point is: the very narrow bandwidth techniques gave a massive S/N increase by reducing noise with such small bandwidth that only small wattage transmitted power was necessary. Large power levels and/or highly directional antennae were not required.
Am I right in thinking the amazing capability of this detection system using WSPR and fixed link pathways, and very little degredation to the detection technique with low levels of transmitted power is because of the use of DSP (digital signal processing) receiver capabilities with highly stable frequencies and small bandwidths, such as G3PLX was using for his dopplergrams?
Douglas Denny. G3ZQE
@John Gilbert
Are you the John Gilbert from Australia that has been involved in the Australian OTHR program
Yes Bruce I am indeed that John Gilbert
@Bruce Ward, @John Gilbert,
With your permissions, I can pass on your email addresses to each other.
I can be contacted at richard@mh370search.com