60 Minutes - Australia features amateur radio in search of MH-370

The news program 60 Minutes in Australia has just produced a segment for their show which features amateur radio and Richard Godfrey, an aerospace engineer, who believes he has tracked the flight of MH-370 and knows the approximate location of it's crash. The method Godfrey is using is an analysis of WSPR Spots which are still available from databases. Analysis shows several dB of signal disturbances in various radio point to point paths which seem to indicate the final flight path of the missing aircraft. There are hundreds of these data points which reveal greater detail than the only seven data points from the satellite pings of the aircraft. Previously all the searches were steered by those seven data points. Now with this new information with greater detail there may be renewed hope of finding the majority of the remains of the aircraft including the flight data recorder. The jury is still out concerning the validity and accuracy of Godfrey's findings.

 

The jury isn't still out - it's left the courtroom, gone home and getting on with it's life.

I've not seen or heard of a single amateur who thinks this is anything but utter bollocks and it's been discussed to death in Australia with the same conclusion.

I cannot find any explanation of how he detects the "disturbances" from a very low power signal bouncing off an airliner considering that VK6 and other locations around the Indian Ocean are not packed full of WSPR Receivers/Transmitters and especially not 7 years ago.

 

Lost me at, "The news program 60 Minutes..."

 

I mean, if his method for pinpointing the location of an airplane based on the WSPR data is sound, shouldn't someone be able to find a known commercial airflight (with good positional data) right now in the current data? (I have not seen any validation of the detection method to date) (not to mention, there are probably more WSPR participants today than 8 years ago..) Don't get me wrong, I hope there is a way to find out what happened, but this seems ill fetched, sensationalistic.

 

I am cautious in my judgment at this point. I have seen nearly the opposite to be true in my years of operating a live meteor radar. When an aircraft, and even in some cases a spacecraft, fly between my receive station and the over the horizon signal source, I can sometime see definite signal reflections lasting for several seconds and up to a minute. In the case of a spacecraft signal reflection, the period is only a few seconds at most and exhibits some doppler shift. What Godfrey is claiming is that he can see from his analysis of the WSPR receive reports that there are sometimes rapid reduction of signal strength where just two minutes ago it was a higher strength and then again for several reports later on the signal was back up to it's previous standard. This, he believes, indicates the aircraft is degrading the strength of the signal path it is flying through at that moment. This is possibly similar to the effect many of you may have witnessed during the days of analog television when an aircraft flies between your house and the TV transmitter causing the signal to pulsate and flutter momentarily. I'm not ready to defend Godfrey's theory but it has my attention and I'm anxious to see more results.

 

100% agree.
I covered this in a video last year. So many nutters and crackpots are jumping on it saying that he's some credible guy without even understanding the basic physics of it..
In summary - it's basically a media ploy to get a search happening again, nothing more or less. Then when the plane is not where he says it is, they shift the goalposts and say oh but it could be here.

 

Well, from a probabilistic analysis you were, exactly at the very moment, together with all other liners flying, among the most safe voyagers of the whole Universe.

Oliver

 

It is a bogus hypothesis, because it can't be tested: he has the plane at the bottom of a 12,000 foot deep trench.

Yeh, I bet.

 

This was discussed here starting in May 2021.

There are many good reasons why one would not expect WSPR tracking to work, especially in the MH370 case, and as far as I know, Godfrey has never presented data for ANY aircraft demonstrating that his method can track it accurately.

As I said back then, he must present convincing data demonstrating that he can accurately and reliably track some random airliner a dozen times - so the we know the result isn’t simply coincidental- before this can begin to be taken seriously. Until then it’s just another crazy crackpot theory.

 

I watched this video and it would be great if his detecting was possible.
What feeds the seeds of doubt for me is the tuning of an old cap tester beside what appears to be a FT707.
Sort of like a bad hollywood movie with ham radio in it.
Has anyone tried this on wspr that lives in a high traffic area.
I'm struggling with understanding the process. Doesn't wsjt-x average individual station signal strength over the receive time.
Wouldn't any aircraft disturbance be too fast & minute to be caught and at least with my setup I've never seen anything on the waterfall have a quick fade or indication of disturbance.
Was he using info from the wspr net.
I've had very fast signal fluctuations on 2M (FM) from landing aircraft, but I'm in the final southern landing path for London airport, planes are either at the end of our subdivision or in the case of the airshows, really close overhead.

It would have been good if they demonstrated him detecting aircraft at distance on hf.
Hope they find the plane and they can prove validity with wspr

 

Sorry to say, but I dont believe in. These shown results produce false hopes. After the latest video I took a look into the weatherdata of that day. There was in the north of Australia the Taifun named "Gillian". To that its normal that thunderstorms exist too, when a Taifun causes havoc . At next the disturbances could be produced by these thunderstorms in different multiple models. At next its well-known, that the heavy rain is able to disturb shortwave signals too. The disturbances could break down a complete signal for a while. At next atmospheric disturbances are able too, which are hard to track. In the following link is the weatherdata for the 08.03.14 contained in german language. The storm arrived from the north-east of Australia, and disturbances in the atmosphere got a unknown radiance.

https://meteo.plus/tropensturm-2014.php

 

I have a better one for you. Flying on a Japan Air Lines 747 while the in-flight entertainment includes a 15 minute news article describing how faulty maintenance was the cause of the crash of a Japan Airlines 747 that killed 505 people, including photos of the survivors being lifted by helicopter from the crash site.

73
Jon, AI1V