Brilliant hack. Turning the SX1262 LoRa engine into a GPSDO-disciplined coherent LFM source opens a real ionospheric chirpsounder for hams — at a BoM that finally makes a NCDXF-style distributed network thinkable.
Minimal ProAm node:
SX1262 dev board (~€15), onboard xtal replaced by an amateur GPSDO output feeding XTA. Required: ppb frequency stability, ~µs timing alignment — well within reach of homebrew amateur GPSDO designs.
Mixer to HF (ADE-1, ~€8) or transverter IF. Mandatory bandpass on the target band — harmonics are severe at low f. Driver LPF, 5-10 W.
RX side: ideally a custom board pairing GPSDO and SDR front-end on the same PCB, in the spirit of KiwiSDR — shared reference clock, on-board ADC, Ethernet IQ streaming. The right open-source ProAm artefact.
Processing: Raspberry Pi 5 (~€80), Python/GNU Radio dechirp pipeline. Real-time at SF12 / BW 7.8 kHz is trivial.
Total: ~€400-600 per node.
Regulatory discipline mirrors the NCDXF/IARU beacon model: coordinated frequencies, low duty cycle, CW ID between sweeps, lowest power that closes the link, declared experiment. Candidate bands matched to ionospheric science: 5 MHz (WRC-15), 10, 14, 21 MHz.
What a handful of nodes across the World would deliver:
Real-time oblique ionograms on multiple paths
TID maps (Travelling Ionospheric Disturbances)
Sporadic-E nowcasting
@f5uii 😀 — holy grail for VHF DXers
Solar-flare SID detection
Geomagnetic storm response tracking
Ground-truth for IRI / NeQuick model validation
@HB9VQQ 😉
Meteor-burst statistics as by-product on 50 MHz
Silicon costs less than a decent microphone, and the science is real. Genuine ProAm territory.