An interactive platform to coordinate the HamSCI Meteor Scatter QSO Party (MSQP) and to serve the data it produces to the research community.
Proposed as a two-semester Computer Science senior capstone project at The University of Scranton, sponsored by Dr. Nathaniel A. Frissell, W2NAF.
MSQP runs six times a year, timed to major meteor showers. Amateur operators around the world work each other on 6 and 10 meters using MSK144, bouncing signals off the ionized trails of meteors, and the resulting logs, spots, and audio recordings feed an active research program on meteor scatter propagation.
Everything around that data is done by hand, by one volunteer. Scoring means reconciling submitted ADIF logs against PSKReporter spot data; the December 2025 event alone captured 280 million lines of it. The consequence is latency:
| Event | Ran | Results published |
|---|---|---|
| Perseids | 11–12 Aug 2025 | 16 Nov 2025 |
| Geminids | 12–13 Dec 2025 | 15 Apr 2026 |
Participants wait three to four months to learn how they did. There is no live view during an event, audio deposits to Zenodo are typed by hand, and nothing indexes the archive for the researchers who need it.
Build, test, and deploy the platform that does the mechanical part: event registry, entrant registration, ADIF and PSKReporter ingest, a deterministic and auditable scoring engine, a live event dashboard, Zenodo deposit integration, automated results publication, and a documented public data API. The organizer keeps control of every score, and the manual workflow stays available as a fallback.
The headline demonstration is to run a real MSQP event on the platform and publish its results within one week.
The full project description presented to students is in docs/project_description.md.
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
docs/project_description.md |
Capstone project description for students and faculty |
notes/ |
Dated session notes |
ai/ai_usage_log.md |
Log of all substantive AI-assisted work sessions |
.claude/ |
AI governance rules and the /commit workflow |
reference/ |
Local-only reference material (gitignored; never committed) |
HamSCI/MSQP— MSQP research questions and reference literatureHamSCI/meteor-scatter— automated MSK144 monitoring for PSWS stationsHamSCI/Machine-Learning-Meteor-Scatter-Classification-Code— meteor scatter signal classifier
Callsigns and Maidenhead grid squares are public by amateur radio convention. Participant email addresses, street addresses, and phone numbers are not, and must never be committed to this repository or published in any product.
This repository follows the ai_project_template standards: every substantive AI-assisted session is logged in ai/ai_usage_log.md before committing, AI-assisted commits carry the [AI-assisted] prefix, and all work complies with the policies in .claude/rules/ai-governance.md.
MIT license; see LICENSE.