For many years hams have said when working the HF bands that there is a strange phenomenon which oftentimes occurs prior to an earthquake… the bands go silent and fill up with noise. What’s even more interesting is that the sun is quiet, therefore there is no chance that this is due to solar activity or any sort of solar storm.

Alex Schwarz, VE7DXW, a ham in Canada decided to explore this phenomenon by creating an RF Seismograph. It’s simply software which scans the various HF bands and then analyzes the noise on the bands. When noise is detected, the graph shows a tall/wide line, which signifies noise. When this line appears, there is usually an earthquake of 6.0M or greater somewhere in the world. The quake generally happens within 3 hours of this line appearing.

I have reviewed Alex’s past detection’s, and it’s really quite interesting. I truly believe a fault must release a ton of energy which ends up in the ionosphere, thus affecting RF. It seems to make sense that some sort of energy is released prior to the ground shaking. I think we’re heading down the right path of being able to predict earthquakes.

Check out Alex’s site for more info at http://users.skynet.be/myspace/mdsr/index.html