Local Date

3 June 2024

Local Time

20:48

Location

At home, Wien

Country or Territory

Austria

Name

Soph Dyer

Satellite

NOAA-19

Radio Callsign

M6NYX

Archive ID

ow403

I have skipped two days of weather notes. It’s Monday. Thunder rolls as Sasha and I frequency shift from one open-weather Zoom call after another. First we heard from L and D in Scotland about how the satellite image decoder is up and running, and the redesign of the Public Archive is almost complete! We then spoke to G in Berlin who shared with us the code that he is writing for the automatic satellite ground stations. Together we started to speculate about how the 3D printed casing of the satellite ground stations could be. We imagine the ground station box resting on a bedroom bookshelf or mounted the wall of an art gallery. We tingled with excitement, encouraging each other in the game of visualising the work complete. In between, Sasha and I spoke with J, a curator in Barcelona who is planning an exhibition on the themes of navigation and orientation … let's see. I took some Ibuprofen to avert a migraine and then couldn't stop sneezing. Sasha giggle when, I turned of my camera instead of muting and loudly blew my running nose. As my work day ended, the thunder storm moved overhead. On a call with just Sasha , we draw on our remaining brain power and belief, I shared my proposal for a sounded-based transmission for the Year of Weather project. Inspired by the desire to 'meet people where they are' and by how past feminist alliances such as F.I.R.E. in Costa Rica and Pirate Radio Women in Ireland used radio to share with their community counter narratives and information, the transmission would share our weather notes intermingled with the realtime local weather updates of a meteorology service. A second important reference is the "VOLMET" radio broadcasts that are rolling weather forecasts for aircraft, read out often by highly gendered and increasingly automated female voices. Before hanging up, Sasha and I began to test the proposal and to think through different scenarios. I had planned to squeeze in a hours more work but my brother called and we spoke almost two hours. It rare that we speak for so long on the phone, so the call was special. Lightening seemed to knock of the signal so I move around the flat, searching for a more stable signal, plugging in my phone to different wall sockets.

decoding

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