Theory/History:There's a cavity in the sky called the ionosphere, which protects the Earth from harmful radiation and reflects radio waves of certain frequencies. Everything that happens in the sky or on Earth bounces back and forth between this cavity. The lowest-frequency signals circumnavigate the planet at a frequency range known as Schumann resonance.
There's also a process called the "piezoelectric effect," in which changes in pressure on crystals generate electricity. Conversely, applying electricity can also deflect crystals. If you've ever heard a beeping sound from an electronic device, that's usually a piezoelectric speaker.
Just like in the sky, constant electric currents and signals flow inside the Earth, among other things leading to its magnetic field.
Before an earthquake, significant stress builds up underground, and this stress causes rock and crystal formations to generate electric currents underground. This is due to the piezoelectric effect.
These currents are reflected back into the sky, altering the signals we receive before an earthquake. From a few hours before to about a week before, the signals become louder and more chaotic.
This is according to colleague Eric Dollard, who conducted these experiments in Northern California in the 1980s and 1990s.
Current Status:Eric Dollard's EPD team recently in 2024 finally finished the main section of the long-line antenna field in middle-of-nowhere Nevada with the purpose of listening to these earth+ionospheric signals. Almost 3,000 feet of wire and a 10yr project restoring a right-of-way, replacing poles, crossarms, etc.
I then spent time developing the infrastructure to actually record, log, and transmit these signals so we can begin long-term analysis.
The finishing touches were added recently to perform a long-term test in late August 2025, where we successfully demonstrated live signal transmission from the site across a cell feed to an Internet host for live reception.
https://hakasays.com:3448/EPDAntennaField.ogg(As of early Sept the station is currently offline repeating previous signals recorded from the site)
A few improvements have to be made in the short-term, but we expect the station to be brought back online as a permanent fixture within the next couple months.
In addition, now that the infrastructure is in-place I intend on deploying a modified short-whip antenna variant to multiple sites throughout the country/planet so we have a clearer picture and some rudimentary ability to triangulate large perturbations in these signals.
The whole thing was an interesting and entertaining set of design challenges+considerations, and I'm glad that the bulk of the problems were able to be addressed.
I will be posting some high-quality audio samples to be analyzed as time permits, and eventually posting links to additional stations as they come on-the-air.
The great thing about this is that because they are Raspberry Pi-based units, they can be upgraded to receive almost any type of data, whether it be whether station, air quality, geiger counters, magnetometers, etc. I will talk a bit more about this as I start integrating them into the system.
Stay tuned!
(ps: thanks, Chet for reminding me to write this
)
"An overly-skeptical scientist might hastily conclude by scooping-up and analyzing a thousand buckets of seawater that the ocean has no fish in it."
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Topic: Distributed Earth/Ionospheric Signals Analysis Project (Read 2814 times)
