Budget Radio Telescope: DRAFT document

Some, very small, fraction of the assemblage here might find this
relevant and/or interesting:

http://www.sbrac.org/files/budget_radio_telescope.doc


Marcus L.
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium

Most interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Patrik

Hi Marcus,

Very nice. We’ve also been looking at using the $8 RTLSDR as a
educational
tool to do exactly the same thing.

Alan Rogers et. al. at Haystack have also developed something similar:

juha

Yes, I’d seen both this, and the earlier SRT.

This new SRT is still about, I’m guessing, a factor of 5 more expensive
than my approach :slight_smile: Although their instrument will be more sensitive,
due
to the larger collecting area, althouth their claimed Tsys (170K,
really that high?) is a bit of a worry…


Marcus L.
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium

Dear Marcus,

thanks for sharing this document. It happens that I’m writing a paper
about
the use of RTL2832U-based dongles applied to software radio (well,
specifically about their use as GNSS receivers), and I would like to
reference your work on radioastronomy as a example of other possible
uses
of those dongles. What would be the correct way to reference it? Do you
have any paper already published, or do you plan to publish something in
the following months? I can refer this document you sent as “Unpublised
work”, but maybe you prefer that I cite another reference. Please let me
know. I have to deliver my paper next September, so there is still time
in
case you are planning to submit your work somewhere.

For the curious minds, those dongles have been already used for building
software-defined oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers, to the
identification of interference sources, FM and AM demodulation,
Automatic
Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) decoding, LTE cell scanning, an
Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver for electronic tracking,
and
even downloading NOAA satellite pictures. It seems that I should add
radioastronomy to that list!

Best regards,
Carles

cite another reference. Please let me know. I have to deliver my paper
next September, so there is still time in case you are planning to
submit your work somewhere.
I guess “unpublished work” for now, and point to the URL. I may polish
it up a bit more and submit it (and perhaps my meteor-scatter paper
from last summer) to the SARA journal.

Keep in mind that this current paper, and the meteor-detector paper from
last summer, are not RTLSDR specific – I’ve used both USRPs
and RTLSDR dongles in this work. The USRPs give somewhat superior
results, but for a small school on a budget, it would be hard to
pass up having a handful of RTLSDR dongles lying around…


Marcus L.
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium