Could a hobby radio network find a missing airliner?
2026-07-30 · EA5IYR
There is a network of amateur radio stations that spends all day transmitting a few watts at each other and writing down what arrived. It is called WSPR — Weak Signal Propagation Reporter — and it exists to map how the ionosphere is behaving.
Every reception is logged: who transmitted, who heard it, when, on what frequency, how strongly. Millions of records, going back years, public.
Which raises a question somebody was always going to ask: if an aircraft crossed one of those paths, would it leave a mark? The claim
Richard Godfrey and collaborators say yes — and that by finding anomalies in the WSPR record from 8 March 2014 they can reconstruct the flight path of MH370, the Malaysia Airlines 777 that disappeared with 239 people on board.
The work produces a specific proposed crash site in the southern Indian Ocean, west of Perth. It has been covered widely and taken seriously enough to feed into arguments about where to search next.
If it worked it would be remarkable: a hobbyist network, built for something else entirely, retroactively solving the biggest mystery in modern aviation. The objection
Radio scientists who have examined it are, on the whole, not persuaded, and the reason is the bottom bar in the diagram.
A WSPR signal that has travelled thousands of kilometres arrives extraordinarily weak — that is the entire point of the protocol, which is engineered to decode signals below the noise floor. The energy an aircraft would scatter back into that path is a small fraction of an already vanishing quantity.
Meanwhile the ionosphere itself is moving constantly. Solar activity, the day-night terminator, sporadic-E, geomagnetic disturbance — the same forces that open and close the bands hour by hour change those paths continuously, and by far more than one aeroplane could.
To find the aircraft you have to separate its signature from an effect several orders of magnitude larger. Critics argue that what the method actually finds is normal ionospheric variation, selected after the fact to fit a route. The test that would settle it
There is an obvious one, and it is worth stating because it is the fair way to judge any claim of this kind.
Take aircraft whose positions are already known — there is no shortage of them, ADS-B has logged years of flights — and run the method blind. If it reliably recovers tracks it was not told in advance, the objection collapses. If it does not, no amount of argument about MH370 matters.
That validation, at the scale that would convince, has not been published. Why it is worth thinking about anyway
Not to settle it here. I do not have the standing to, and this is a live technical dispute among people who do.
But it is a good example of something that recurs in radio: a public dataset, a genuinely clever idea about what might be hiding in it, and the hard question of whether a signal is really there or whether the analysis is finding structure in noise. The instinct that protects you is the same one that makes a repeatable observation worth more than a spectacular one.
Two hundred and thirty-nine people are still missing. That is exactly the circumstance in which a method should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
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Sources: Radiant Physics — WSPR can't find MH370, The Search for MH370 — WSPR aircraft tracking, Test & Measurement Tips — can ham signals find the crash site?, AirlineRatings — tracking expert responds.