Помещаю здесь.
Сегодня не стало этого замечательного ученого-радиолюбителя, специалиста в области VLF, математика и программиста, любителя астрономии - умер Paul Nicholson.
Он участвовал практически во всех экспериментах на СДВ, начиная с самых первых попыток Стефана с антенной на воздушном змее. Прием в Todmorden был великолепный! Даже мне в 2020 году посчастливилось поработать на передачу на 8270, сигнал был принят Полом! Для меня это высшее радиолюбительское достижение. Помню, Пол тогда очень тепло отнесся к моим попыткам и написал, что сейчас включит один из замечательных советских фильмов и выпьет традиционный русский напиток в честь нашего успеха на VLF.
Скромный порядочный человек, никогда себя не "выпячивавший".
Последние пару лет он провел в Нортумберлэнде, где искал самое тихое место для новой VLF позиции и занимался программированием для автоматизации сьемки обьектов космоса с любительского телескопа.
Но затем, видимо довольно внезапно, проявилась онкология - рак легких и костей.
I'm Paul Nicholson's wife. He is in hospital in a palliative care unit for cancer in his bones and lungs. I'm with him as much as possible. Need to find homes for hardware and software. Abelian.org may soon vanish. Replies welcome, can pass them on verbally.
Deborah Washington
p.s. we actually got married today in our hospital room.
Последние недели Пол провел в хосписе со своей женой. В рассылке прозвучало так много трогательных писем со словами поддержки и благодарности, что я даже невольно удивлялся, как многие умеют проникновенно писать, излагая свои мысли и чувства по этому печальному поводу. Сегодня Paul Nicholson, как ему и хотелось, в спокойствии заснул и не проснулся.
Очень жаль, что ушел этот замечательный ученый-радиолюбитель, изобретатель знаменитого EbNaut.
Sadly Paul died at today 4:30 am (UTC+1).
I was with him round the clock except for a trip home to collect documents to enable us to get married last Wednesday.
His breathing became slower and shallower until he stopped breathing. It was very calm and peaceful. His wish was to go to sleep and not wake up. I'm so grateful his wish was granted.
I don't know how I'm going to cope without him. I miss his voice.
Thank you for the messages about my wonderful, amazing, brilliantly minded husband, Paul.
Deborah
Приведу здесь пару писем самого Пола, в которых он подводит некоторый итог работе на VLF:
I think it was about Autumn
2002 when I first set up a VLF receiver here and began
experimenting with software to do hum filtering, whistler
detection, timing, and recording. All of which eventually
turned into vlfrx-tools.
By January 2003 I was regularly picking up whistlers and
auroral signals from the home receiver, something I was never
able to do with a portable receiver on outdoor expeditions.
Never in the right place at the right time!
The full history of developments can be traced in the VLF
group archives, it's all there, the discussions, questions,
experiments, very much a group effort. It took a few years
for us to master the art of natural radio reception from home,
calibration and timestamping, continuous recording, and
automatic monitoring for interesting signals.
Job done! Home reception is surely as good as it can be.
And then in 2010 along came Stefan Shaefer with a huge loading
coil and a kite big enough to need a car to hold it down and
a NOTAM to warn air traffic.
That upped the game considerably. Timing had to be improved
from mS to nS, locking to MSF - fine for timing whistlers,
was suddenly nowhere near good enough and it had to be GPS
from then on.
And we had to invent a really effective sferic blanker,
eventually gaining 20dB on the S/N of very weak narrow band
artificial signals from pioneering amateur stations.
It took four more years of refinements to receive amateur
signals from North America, thoroughly vindicating those
adventurous radio amateurs dreaming of getting a VLF signal
beyond the garden fence.
And all that fed back into the natural radio side of things
- having now a timing system able to locate lightning strokes
and to search for meteor signatures.
Job done now?
Of course not. We can't just settle for carrier detections,
we want to send messages at VLF! Markus experimented with
MFSK from 2011, OPDS from 2013 and then we played with BPSK
from 2014. We kept being surprised by how good the results
could be when we got everything right. Exciting times for
all involved!
Job surely done now? Well it probably is for Todmorden.
Reception is now firmly limited by electrical interference of
all kinds and it gets a little worse each year.
I want to move rebuilt and improved receivers to a more remote
location further north.
May as well move myself too.
And get some darker skies and some new and wilder hills to roam.
I treat myself to a 6 month sabbatical from commercial work
before I look for the next programming contract (although
interesting offers are welcome!).
Am still very busy with improving the lightning tracking
in India. Each year the monsoon lightning take a terrible
toll and the system will save lives through a new free app
delivering warnings. So beyond being interesting and great
fun for 20 years, there's some real practical benefits from all
this, from being able to deploy precision receivers made from
low cost commodity parts and open source software in places that
are mostly, like Todmorden, far from ideal for VLF reception.
--
Paul Nicholson
--
И письмо в момент завепшения работы позиции в Todmorden:
Thank you all for the kind send-off to Todmorden VLF. No sadness,
rather looking forward to the next round of experiments at a new
site with new potential.
The 'milestones' have tailed off in the last couple of years. New
frontiers are needed!
Tod VLF is completely dismantled now. Recyclable parts boxed for
the move, the rest scrapped. Some cables remain buried - too hard
to dig up! What will a future archeologist make of them?
Perhaps they will delve into ancient archives and discover that they
once carried the tiny signals of W4DEX, RN3AUS, VO1NA, F5VLB, IW4DXW,
OK2BVG, WH2XBA, EA4GHB, DK1IS, SQ5BPF, G3XIZ, DF6NM, and many others,
along with a few not so tiny signals from DK7FC and DL3JMM.
http://abelian.org/vlf/amateur-radio/
Tom wrote:
> Over that period, do you recall how long Linux ran without
> rebooting?
Not more than a few months due to the unreliable mains power
here and my reluctance to install a UPS - they seem often to be
terrible sources of VLF interference. So instead, I set things
up to happily recover and resume work after a power outage.
The stream servers are a difference matter, living as the do (did)
in a data center. I got nearly 7 years from one of them, which isn't
especially long for Linux. Its up time ended when it started having
hardware problems. Another did over 4 years, ending when it
had to be moved to another site.
--
Paul Nicholson
--
Очень я любил зимними вечерами надеть наушники и слушать VLF- поток с его приемника. Теперь этого нет и, возможно, трансляция всех остальных потоков прекратится. Жаль. Может быть в память о Paul, попытаюсь создать свою постоянную приемную позицию на VLF. Посмотрим...
Грустно.
