{"id":8,"date":"2012-01-29T13:09:28","date_gmt":"2012-01-29T20:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/?p=8"},"modified":"2012-01-29T13:09:28","modified_gmt":"2012-01-29T20:09:28","slug":"receiver-integrator-digitizer-and-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/?p=8","title":{"rendered":"Receiver, Integrator, Digitizer and Software"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my home observatory, I started with the Radio Jove receiver from NASA’s Radio Jove Project.<\/a><\/p>\n

This was a fairly easy-to-build kit with great directions, not just for the receiver but also the antenna setup and installation.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I don’t have enough space to put up a phased antenna array.\u00a0 Also, I’m bordered by power lines on the north and south sides of my property.\u00a0\u00a0 Also, since I’m in an urban area, I knew that I’d pick up a lot of noise.\u00a0\u00a0 Not to worry.\u00a0\u00a0 Solar observations are also quite interesting, and since the Sun is such a good signal source (especially so far this year), I opted for an antenna in my attic.<\/p>\n

The basic components of my system are the Radio Jove receiver, a set of integration circuits, a digitizer and some software to process the data.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Radio Jove Receiver<\/p><\/div>\n

For the integration circuits, I’ve tried a few different versions.\u00a0\u00a0 As I like to keep tinkering, the current integration circuits are on a breadboard.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Integration circuits: diode with resistor\/capacitor combinations<\/p><\/div>\n

I chose the 16-bit digitizer from Webtronics. <\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Digitizer<\/p><\/div>\n

I chose this digitizer for a few reasons. \u00a0 Many Radio Jove(RJ) observers use their computer sound cards and some processing software. \u00a0 As that software only runs on Windows and I wanted to run this on a headless (no monitor, keyboard or mouse), I opted for a solution running on Unix or Linux. \u00a0 For my day job, I work at the University of Utah Seismograph Stations. \u00a0 We’ve been using the Webtronics digitizers for a while in remote locations to process seismic data. \u00a0\u00a0 Further, I opted to use some of our seismic data acquisition and plotting software to produce graphics of the data I collected.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Helicorder output from digitizer and receiver above<\/p><\/div>\n

For those of you who’ve seen the traditional earthquake helicorder, this might look almost familiar.\u00a0\u00a0 The chart shows 24 hours of data, in 15-minute horizontal traces.\u00a0\u00a0 The colors are just used to differentiate the 15-minute slice.\u00a0\u00a0 Times in standard time are on the left side, in UTC on the right.\u00a0\u00a0 On the extreme right is a DC offset.\u00a0\u00a0 In order to keep the traces from jumping all over the image, data for the first 1-2 minutes are used to determine a DC offset to bring the trace back on center.\u00a0\u00a0 Which is why there are traces that jump up for a while and then later seem to drop off.\u00a0 If you look at the DC offset values, you’ll see a large signal was observed for part of that time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my home observatory, I started with the Radio Jove receiver from NASA’s Radio Jove Project. This was a fairly easy-to-build kit with great directions, not just for the receiver but also the antenna setup and installation.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I don’t … Read the rest of this entry →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equipment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14,"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amateurradioastronomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}