Dayton Hamvention Announcement: https://hamvention.org/event-details/awards/
Video clip of Hamvention Awards Committee announcing award winners:
http://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/hamvention%C2%AE-2019-award-winners-announced.650213/
Citation:
2019 Amateur of The Year: Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF
Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, has been a licensed ham since 1998 and is the principal founder and leader of the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI), a collective designed to join professional scientific researchers and the amateur radio community together to help each other. Nathaniel first learned about ham radio while in middle school from his elmer, Greg Nitkowski, N2BSA, at a Jamboree on the Air event. The SSB voices he heard from around the world while in that small cabin in the woods captured his imagination and led him to study the ionosphere ever since! Scouting has played an incredibly important part of Nathaniel’s amateur radio career. He started the W2FSR ham radio station at Forestburg Scout Reservation, where he served as Technology Center Director and taught radio merit badge and licensing for 6 summers. He also served on K2BSA National Scout Jamboree staff three times, is an Eagle Scout, a Vigil Honor member, and remains an active scouter.
While finishing his B.S. in Physics and Music Education from Montclair State University (MSU), Nathaniel returned to the Dayton Hamvention where he met students from K4KDJ, the Virginia Tech Amateur Radio Club. Based on this meeting, he went to pursue his Ph.D. from the Virginia Tech (VT) SuperDARN HF Radar laboratory. At both MSU and VT, Nathaniel was active in the school clubs, teaching licensing classes, and serving as a VE. Nathaniel’s PhD research discovered that medium scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) are primarily associated with polar vortex activity rather than auroral activity as previously thought. His research on the ionosphere also gave him the opportunity to travel to and operate from many remote locations, including Adak Island, Svalbard, and McMurdo Station, Antarctica.
Today, Nathaniel is a Research Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT CSTR) where leads the HamSCI effort and works with undergraduate students. Nathaniel led the Solar Eclipse QSO Party (SEQP) during the August 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse, a contest-like amateur radio science experiment to study eclipse ionospheric effects. Peer-reviewed results were published in Geophysical Research Letters. He now coordinates the annual HamSCI workshop, where amateurs and professionals meet in person to work on science projects together. Nathaniel is a co-advisor to the NJIT Amateur Radio Club, K2MFF, a member of the American Radio Relay League, the Radio Club of America, the American Geophysical Union, and holds DXCC.
