[NCLUG] ISO collaboration

[Joseph DiVerdi]

Greetings,

I've been spending a fair amount of time working on a (seemingly never ending) personal radio astronomy project with some friends (http://www.dses.org/) down at Table Mountain on the North side of Boulder where we have access to a pair of rather large (18m) diameter, parabolic, radio dishes (http://xtrsystems.com/temp/ra/table_mountain_dish.jpeg). Besides refurbishing the mechanical parts of the two-axis mounts, we have been designing and building more modern position sensing and control systems, a very important anemometer to monitor wind speed (to tell us when to stow the dishes), lots of radio reception equipment, and local (Linux) hosts to control the whole lot while slurping in lots of data.

Our (somewhat remote) enjoys excellent network connectivity through local fiber and although it is fairly well isolated behind various federal/institutional firewalls we have managed to convince our gracious hosts to permit us to punch through and access a few servers that I have set up on site. Using these we can (or, in many cases, will) read acquired radio data, monitor dish position, control dish position, monitor wind conditions, and so on. One of the goals for this facility is a high degree of remote operation. For some time I have located a Very Low Frequency (VLF) SDR system at the site (in part because of its relative radio quiet) which is tied to a Red-Hat-based data slurper, processor, and server. This has proven to be a useful test bed for some of our more ambitious efforts.

As part of the data slurping we have a very powerful Software Defined Radio data acquisition receiver (SDR-14, http://www.rfspace.com/) which captures RF signals at 66+Msamples/s, processes them (under user control), and spits a subset of them out the back through a USB port. The manufacturer offers a Windows application to interface the hardware and has promised suitable Linux components for some time now. The USB interface is based on a FT245BM chip set (Future Technology Devices International, Ltd., http://www.ftdi.com/) which has 2.4 kernel SourceForge project in place (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ftdi-usb-ft245/).

There are many design issues to noodle out and tasks to complete and I would like to extend an open invitation for NCLUG members (and their friends and families ;) to participate in our efforts. To date, I have served as system architect, sys admin, Linux advocate and evangelist, and general pain-in-the-ass. I would welcome other like-minded pains-in-the-ass who would enjoy playing with radios, big antennas, and computers. Drop me a line (on- or off-list) if you're interested.

Best regards,
Joseph
-- 
Joseph A. DiVerdi, Ph.D., M.B.A.
http://xtrsystems.com/           970.980.5868 (voice)
PGP Key ID: 0xD50A9E33           KC0QPZ