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Radio and Student Achievement
The Educational Use of VLF
A Reason to Celebrate
The annual arrival of the NASA INSPIRE Journal is always a treat I look forward to. Vol. 26 (Spring 2022) has just landed on my desk. This long-running NASA project supports student research in the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), which, of course, includes Radio. Each issue of the free journal has a dedicated section on ‘Nature Radio’, or Very Low Frequency (VLF) Monitoring.
This year, Marcelo Lago Araújo has contributed a piece on A VLFD-3 Station in an RFI Environment: Promoting Radio Astronomy for Education (INSPIRE Journal, Spring 2022: 14-18), which makes for interesting reading for VLF enthusiasts.
The monitoring is done with the INSPIRE VLF-3 Radio Receiver kit, which you can order from the website at a low cost, and which we have featured in RadioUser before (RadioUser, October 2018: 60). Marcelo built his own loop and reports on his attempts to minimise unwanted interference and learn from the project.
Like many in this field, he has been using the Spectrum Lab software package to visualise the signals. A very worthwhile read. Thank you to Eva Kloostra for keeping us updated on this project, and for supporting RadioUser on the NASA/ INSPIRE website.
https://www.radioenthusiast.co.uk/articles/elf-vlf-radio-the-nasa-inspire-project