This is a re-post of one of my posts in the middle of a thread that essentially created this category:
I think this could be an off-shoot of the SatNOGS project. I’ve recently talked to several people that are interested in #RadioAstronomy. The Open-Source rotator could most certainly be used to move a set of loop yagis (or parabolic dish?) at various objects in the sky for the Hydrogen Line (and Doppler Shifted down). The database could contain predictions for objects in our solar system and rather than LEO satellites. Eg. the Sun, the Moon and Jupiter. Various parts of the Milky Way might be interesting to track. How about tracking meteors, using known radar sources and crowd-sourcing receiving the return signal?
There’s a wealth of information in this document:
Notes on Amateur Radio Astronomy for Beginners - rtl-sdr.com RTL-SDR.com reader Jean Marie Polard (F5VLB) recently wrote in to let us know about a useful document that he has put together which covers beginners amateur radio astronomy. The document includes various introductions to the types of…
There is no reason the Sun could not be one of the first objects to be tracked by a project like this. A disturbed sun has a lot of emissions between 30 and 3 GHz. The earth is the sun’s natural satellite. Yet, due to the earth’s rotation, the sun appears as if it has an orbit around the earth once a day.
I am pretty interested in this. I have a horn a friend made that should let me see the Hydrogen Line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line). Any idea what it would take to add celestial objects to the satnogs network?
For 2-6 GHz, I’ve found an interesting mixer/oscillator that works pretty well to down convert into 1 GHz or so. It’s called moRFeus. It’s available here: https://othernet.is/products/morfeus-1
Is there recommended software that someone with a station could use to do the solar flare detection? I’m new to radio astronomy practice, and would like to start trying things like this out to get experience.
I’m helping TAPR with an SDR design intended to support radio astronomy. Nothing would make me happier than to make it easy to deploy the new SDR in a way that it “just works” with SatNOGs.
A small group of us are participating in the PINS challenge to jump start our understanding and capabilities with machine learning for things like Ionospheric modeling and prediction.
All of what we learn, we are going to put right to work for open source radio astronomy efforts.
We hope to make any work resulting from this experience as easy as possible for SatNOGs to include and for station operators to incorporate.
While the challenge provides the IQ data, we’d obviously need radio hardware at stations that collects live data.
One of the things that can help with data management (high-resolution IQ samples of wide bandwidth rapidly gets out of hand) is a class of analysis called federated learning. We’re going to be digging in to that to lower the bandwidth requirements for updating the machine learning models.
Ok more soon! We have a bit of time before PINS really starts. We’re learning how to use Tensorflow and trying to anticipate the sorts of architectures needed for the models we are going to submit.
If anyone is interested in joining our PINS team (we are called pins-and-needles) then consider yourself welcome, just send me a message.
Indeed, we need to explore the radio astronomy possibilities. One way would be to piggyback observations onto the SatNOGS operations, while another is to implement our own server/capabilities using some of the fine SatNOGS concepts.
I’m trying to get manual control of my station for testing/optimization – to manually specify frequency, mode, etc., (or just initiate an observation).
Cheers,
David, n4hbo
For real radio astronomy observations it is necessary to implement Very-long-baseline interferometry. In this case, a network of small antennas can achieve truly scientific parameters. But for synchronization of receivers it is necessary a rubidium frequency standard.
“Normal” receiving stations do not fulfill the requirements for interferometry. But at 21cm a single station can scan the sky and produce a 1-d or 2-d map of the sky. The trick is signal integration to improve the S/N-ratio.
