Local Date

26 May 2024

Local Time

12:50

Location

Hackney Downs, London

Country or Territory

United Kingdom

Name

Sasha Engelmann

Satellite

NOAA-18

Radio Callsign

M6IOR

Archive ID

ow395

The pass started with an experience of signal flooding: Meteor MN2-3 drowned out the signal of NOAA-18 in a powerful broadcast many times the bandwidth of the analogue NOAA satellite. I could spot the Russian satellite by the characteristic 'surge' of energy that suddenly appeared around 137.9125 MHz, also the downlink frequency of NOAA-18. Only a few minutes later, I found myself speaking of another kind of flood with Ria and Philip, two Jehovah's witnesses who visited my ground station. We had a wonderful conversation about 'seeing' the satellite through radio waves and the types of clouds forming (of which Ria could identify many), and when I mentioned NOAA, Ria immediately connected the name to the Noah who predicted the great flood. I was immediately reminded of the words of Daisy Hildyard when she wrote a response to my and Soph's first open-weather performance, 'Open Work, Second Body'. Daisy begins with the story of Noah's ark as remembered by Proust: "Noah could never have had so a clear view of the world, wrote Proust, as when he gazed upon it from within his ark, sealed though it was, and when darkness was all over the Earth". Later, she describes, "that feeling that isolation and solitude can illuminate if not irradiate a feeling of the outside world". As it was for Ria, for Daisy, "it's hard not to see a gesture toward the old story of the ark that floats alone above the world it came from, a story that was also about making sense of strange weather and predicting or creating futures... a story about how different bodies weather the environment differently". As I leave the park, Ria asks if I can email her the satellite image, and of course I say yes. I think about the image as another kind of ark, floating between my laptop and Ria's, though perhaps on a journey that, by virtue of our conversation, is slightly less lonely.

decoding

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