The National Weather Service Forecast Office in Cleveland will conduct a scheduled update to our Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) from the morning of Monday, May 12, 2025, through the afternoon of Wednesday, May 14, 2025. The NWS uses the AWIPS computer system to display and integrate weather and water information, as well as to send life-saving information, such as weather and water warnings, to the public and you. During the update period (possibly extending into Thursday, May 15), forecast operations will be managed by the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Buffalo, NY, to minimize any potential service interruptions.

No impacts to our core services of forecast products and weather watches, warnings, and advisories are anticipated during this time. However, there will be limited impacts to the following services: All NOAA Weather Radio transmitters maintained by NWS Cleveland will be offline during the installation. This includes the following transmitters: Akron, Cleveland, Bellevue, Mansfield, Youngstown, Carey, Toledo, Grafton, Erie, and Meadville. Additionally, the weekly radio test scheduled for May 14 will be postponed to Thursday, May 15.

Local graphical forecast maps hosted in various locations on www.weather.gov/cle will not be updated. This includes all maps on the Graphical Hazardous Weather Outlook page (https://www.weather.gov/erh/ghwo?wfo=cle) and many graphics focusing on northern Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania on our Briefing page (https://www.weather.gov/cle/quick_brief). The Weather Forecast Office in Cleveland will remain open and staffed during this period for public and partner phone calls, as well as for additional functions that can be performed without AWIPS. If you have any questions, please contact Freddie Zeigler, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, via email at Freddie.Zeigler@noaa.gov or by phone at (216) 416-29146384 ext 223

WPSD Project.

WPSD is a next-generation digital voice software suite & distribution for amateur radio use, enjoyed by many thousands of hams around the globe. It is used for personal hotspots and repeaters alike. It supports M17, DMR, D-Star, Yaesu System Fusion (YSF/C4FM), P25, NXDN digital voice modes & POCSAG data/paging.

WPSD is available as installable disk images, and multiple platforms & devices are supported. The WPSD Project is free and open-source software (FOSS).

I find the WPSD hotspot software to be very well done. It is actively maintained and regularly improved. The project is worthy of support from the amateur radio community. Chip W0CHP has a page explaining how people can help the project, at: https://w0chp.radio/articles/how-to-contribute-to-wpsd/. Please take a look and consider giving some much needed support to the WPSD project.

M17 is a digital radio modulation mode developed by Wojciech Kaczmarski (amateur radio call sign SP5WWP) et al. M17 is primarily designed for voice communications on the VHF amateur radio bands, and above. The project received a grant from the Amateur Radio Digital Communications in 2021 and 2022. The protocol has been integrated into several hardware and software projects. In 2021, Kaczmarski received the ARRL Technical Innovation Award for developing an open-source digital radio communication protocol, leading to further advancements in amateur radio.

Learn more about Kaczmarski on his QRZ page: https://www.qrz.com/db/SP5WWP

The M17 Project stands on the open source character of this protocol:

M17 is developing open source hardware, software, and offers a complete digital radio protocol for data and voice, made by and for amateur radio operators. Our protocol’s voice mode uses the free and open Codec 2 voice encoder. This means there are no patents, no royalties, and no licensing or legal barriers to scratch-building your own radio or modifying one you already own.

Why should you care?

As the M17 Project stated, open source gives you freedom: freedom to enjoy, freedom to innovate, and freedom to use the M17 protocol. M17 is about unlocking the capabilities that amateur radio hardware should already have.

Since there are no patents, royalties, or licensing costs, the high cost of entry into digital communications may be significantly reducing. This allows more radio amateurs to enter this part of the hobby and enjoy clear digital communications around the world.

How to get involved

You can certainly get involved in some of the software projects related to M17, like merfd and gomerdash.

You can participate in an M17 users group on Groups.io. Says Steve Stroh N8GNJ:

There’s an email list for M17 users – https://groups.io/g/M17-Users. I created that list about a year ago after I’d come to the conclusion (in a series of articles on M17 in Zero Retries) that M17 was essentially ready to go for “mainstream” use – there were radios, repeaters, reflectors, modems, etc. No one had quite put all the pieces together. So I started m17-users for us ordinary users to discuss usage of M17.

You can also become involved with the M17 Foundation. They say:

Our goal is to provide the amateur radio community with quality, open-source software and hardware solutions. As the name suggests, we are focused on supporting the M17 digital voice protocol, along with its open-source software and hardware implementations.

The M17 Foundation is sponsoring the M17 Conference 2025 in Poland, occurring the weekend before the Zero Retries Digital Conference in Everett, Washington.

The creation of M17 occurred recently and innovation continues. This is a great moment to become engaged with M17. You can use M17 right now. You can build, contribute to code, and come up with new ways of using this open protocol. If you believe, like I do, that M17 is good for our amateur radio hobby, you can also help support the M17 Foundation with a donation.

Your contributions matter: use the M17 protocol, spread the word, build radios, write code, expand the uses of M17, or donate funds.

If you’ve been enjoying the auroras of Solar Cycle 25, we’ve got good news. The next few solar cycles could be even more intense–the result of a little-known phenomenon called the “Centennial Gleissberg Cycle.”

You’ve probably heard of the 11-year sunspot cycle. The Gleissberg Cycle is a slower modulation, which suppresses sunspot numbers every 80 to 100 years. For the past ~15 years, the sun has been near a low point in this cycle, but this is about to change.

New research published in the journal Space Weather suggests that the Gleissberg Cycle is waking up again. If this is true, solar cycles for the next 50 years could become increasingly intense.

“We have been looking at protons in the South Atlantic Anomaly,” explains the paper’s lead author Kalvyn Adams, an astrophysics student at the University of Colorado. “These are particles from the sun that come unusually close to Earth because our planet’s magnetic shield is weak over the south Atlantic Ocean.”

Above: The South Atlantic Anomaly (blue) is a weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field where particles from the sun can come relatively close to Earth [more]

It turns out that protons in the South Atlantic Anomaly are a “canary in a coal mine” for the Gleissberg Cycle. When these protons decrease, it means the Gleissberg Cycle is about to surge. “That’s exactly what we found,” says Adams. “The protons are clearly decreasing in measurements we obtained from NOAA’s Polar Operational Environmental Satellites.”

Protons in the South Atlantic Anomaly are just the latest in a growing body of evidence suggesting that the “Gleissberg Minimum” has passed. Current sunspot counts are up; the sun’s ultraviolet output has increased; and the overall level of solar activity in Solar Cycle 25 has exceeded forecasts. It all adds up to an upswing in the 100-year cycle.

It also means that Joan Feynman was right. Before she passed away in 2020, the pioneering solar physicist was a leading researcher of the Gleissberg Cycle, and she firmly believed that the centennial oscillation was responsible for the remarkable weakness of Solar Cycle 24 (2012-2013). In a seminal paper published in 2014, she argued that the minimum of the Gleissberg Cycle fell almost squarely on top of Solar Cycle 24, making it the weakest cycle in 100 years. The tide was about to turn.

The resurgence of the Gleissberg Cycle makes a clear prediction for the future: Solar Cycles 26 through 28 should be progressively intense. Solar Cycle 26, peaking in ~2036, would be stronger than current Solar Cycle 25, and so on. The projected maximum of the Gleissberg Cycle is around 2055, aligning more or less with Solar Cycle 28. That cycle could be quite intense.

“With a major increase in launch rates, it’ll be important to plan for changes to the space environment that thousands of satellites and spacecraft are flying through from all sides,” says Adams. “Solar activity and particle fluxes could all be very different in the decades ahead.”