• Tune your radio (in AM mode) to the carrier signal.
• Set your receiver's mode to USB (upper sideband). For a 10 MHz carrier, tune to 9.999 MHz (9999.000 kHz - see image) and listen for the 1000 Hz tone. This is the main thing we'll be looking for when we analyze your data. 
• If you have an adjustable filter in your receiver, set it as close to 2.5 kHz as possible.

We will be advising most participants to use an 8kHz sampling rate in the section below. If your radio is relatively new (manufactured after the year 2000 or so) that should be just fine. If you're running an older radio, however, your filters may not have a sharp enough cutoff. (You can see this process in a video here.) To check the filter bandwidth on your receiver:

• Tune your radio (in AM mode) to the carrier signal.
• Set your receiver's mode to USB (upper sideband). For a 10 MHz carrier, tune to 9.999 MHz (9999.000 kHz - see image) and listen for the 1000 Hz tone. Tune down to 9.998 MHz and listen for the higher 2000 Hz tone. Finally, tune down to 9.997 MHz and see if you hear a 3000 Hz tone. If you don't hear a strong carrier signal, you're fine - stick with 8 kHz. If you do hear the tone, you may want to use a higher sampling frequency in Step 5 below. 22050 Hz is a pretty good bet. You can gauge the filesize for different settings here. 

3) Set up Audacity metadata. 

Download this XML template and make a note of the directory it downloads to: EclipseTags.xml

Under Edit>Metadata, click "Load" and select the file, then edit it to fit your station.. (You can also add metadata manually using the list below.)

 

 

• Under Artist Name, put your callsign. (If you are a shortwave listener and not a ham, please use your name or SWL callsign.)
• Under Album Title, put "December 2020 Eclipse."
• Under Year, 2020.
• Under Genre, put your radio model. 

• Email Address
• Rig
• Antenna
• Sound Card
• Frequency
• AGC (on or off)
• Latitude (please use decimals, not minutes and seconds!)
• Longitude 
• Elevation (m)
• Time zone (Format example: UTC-05:00)
• Grid Square
• Country

IMPORTANT: If you have multiple radios collecting data simultaneously under a single callsign, add a hyphen and station number for each station wherever you would otherwise use the callsign. For example, if station W8EDU is running data collection simultaneously on a Flex radio and an Icom radio, they should label one as W8EDU-1 and the other as W8EDU-2, include a comment in the metadata for each station explaining that the operator ran multiple stations, and make sure that the metadata is correct and complete. This will make it much easier to sort through the data from the experiment during the analysis phase. 

5) Set recording settings and make a test recording.

Set your recording to Mono (1 channel) on the pulldown menu in the middle of the top toolbar.

 

Make sure your project rate is set to 8000 Hz from the pulldown menu in the bottom left corner of the screen.

 

Set your audio input to the sound card connected to your radio. The device names will vary. You may have to experiment to make sure the source you're recording from is the correct one.

 

Hit the record ⬤ button; you should see the first track start recording, with the correct track name and timestamp. If the track name is not correct, try rebooting your computer and recording again.

Hit stop ⏹️, then record ⬤ again. This time, you should see a second track appear. The name on each track will correspond to its start time. 

 

Note the "Disk space remaining for recording" at the bottom of your screen. One week of recording is 168 hours, so you may need to pause and restart data collection during the experiment. The estimate also may not be entirely accurate. Check Audacity's documentation on recording length here. 

 

6) Save the project.

Make sure to stop ⏹️ the recording before you continue.

Save the project (File > Save). This will let the computer hang on to your settings. You may see a window asking if you want to save the project even though it has no tracks in it: click OK. 

 

7) Check to make sure your WAV files save correctly.

Create a directory to save your files to according to the following convention: "<Callsign>_Eclipse_Dec2020". For example: W8EDU_Eclipse_Dec2020. (If you're running simultaneous data collection on multiple radios, use the hyphenated identifier described in Step 3.)

 

Go to File > Export > Export Multiple. Select the directory that you want to save your files to. Under "Name Files", make sure the option "Using Label/Track Name" is selected.

 

Click "Export." You should get a dialogue box confirming that each track has been saved to its own WAV file. (Note: If your files are too large to export, see the FAQ below.)

When these are done, you can delete your test tracks by clicking the X in the upper left hand corner of the track. 

 

When you open the directory, you should see the artist and album metadata. Confirm that your filenames are in the correct format: "W8EDU_R__2020-10-23_22-36-18.wav"., for example. 

 

You should record your data on a drive that has at least 10 GB of free space. If you are running Windows, navigate to your data directory and activate compression:  Properties -> General -> Advanced  -> Compress contents to save disk space. (See screen shot below).