01/26/2024

ARRL Member and active radio amateur Dr. Philip Erickson, W1PJE, is the new
director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack
Observatory.

The prestigious scientific appointment is the continuation of a radio interest
that began in his youth. "I started as a shortwave listener in the mid-1970's
as a middle school student. So, in some sense, I was always fooling with
antennas in the back yard and trying to understand why signals got to me at
different times -- why were they different in the day and at night? What was
the farthest place I could hear, or the closest place?"  

That early interest led him to an electrical engineering degree and ultimately,
a doctorate in space plasma physics from Cornell University that he earned in
1998. Erickson was first licensed as a ham only about 10 years ago, but he says
the professional hardware he worked with daily scratched the itch until he
could gain amateur privileges. Erickson enjoys homebrewing gear, learning from
the foundations of vintage equipment, and using amateur radio in the scientific
space. "An intense interest to me that crosses the boundary of what I do
professionally and what I do as a radio amateur is what's happening with the
HamSCI Collective... Can you use the observations that are already being made
in the process of conducting the hobby and extract information from them? It
turns out you can -- there's a lot of ionospheric information buried in there,"
he said.  

The mission of the Haystack Observatory is to develop technology for radio
science applications, to study the structure of our galaxy and the larger
universe, to advance scientific knowledge of our planet and its space
environment, and to contribute to the education of future scientists and
engineers, according to MIT[1]. The facility is home to research projects that
span spectrum from VLF to 388 GHz.  

"We are almost a completely radio and radar observatory... We have a geospace
group, which is most-closely associated with ARRL type ideas: the dynamics of
the ionosphere and neutral part of the atmosphere, all the way out into
near-Earth space. We are an observational group, so we use a bunch of different
tools -- radars, radios, sometimes data from satellites, and mostly data from
ground-based observations."  

Erickson enjoys explaining to the uninitiated that amateur radio is not only
still an active hobby, but that it is an important space for discovery. "You
learn a lot about many different aspects of technical and science work [in ham
radio]," he said.  

While his day job keeps him on the edge of radio technology, Erickson is glad
to see amateur radio is keeping pace. He says the coding of WSJT-X digital
weak-signal modes such as FT8 and WSPR created by Dr. Joe Taylor, K1JT, are
more advanced than most hams realize.  

"If you were to go to an electrical engineering class, that's what you would
see as the edge of how to pack information into a very small bandwidth. I enjoy
pointing that out to people and getting them to understand that this other
modulation mode is just one of the other palettes that are available."

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/philip-erickson-named-director-mit-haystack-observatory-1215

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