RADIO ASTRONOMY Journal of the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers May–June 2014 May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 1 Radio Waves President’s Page 3 Editors’ Notes 4 News Mark Your Calendar 5 Bill Lord SARA President European Conference on Amateur Radio Astronomy 5 SARA Annual Conference at NRAO 6 Melinda Lord Keynote Speaker 8 Editor Abstracts 9 Whitham D. Reeve Tentative Schedule 13 Contributing Editor Ladies Outings 15 Door Prizes 15 Christian Monstein Officer and Director Nominations 17 Contributing Editor Voting Ballot 22 Stan Nelson Radio Jove Conference 23 Contributing Editor Abstracts 23 Tentative Radio JOVE Meeting Schedule 24 Radio Astronomy is published bimonthly as the official journal of the Society of Astronomy Day‐ Ciprian Sufitchi 26 Amateur Radio Astronomers. Duplication of Astronomy Festival on the National Mall‐ Kerry Smith and Stephen Tzikas 26 uncopyrighted material for educational Space Weather Innovation Competition‐ Mardina Abdullah, et. al. 27 purposes is permitted but credit shall be given to SARA and to the specific author. Observations Copyrighted materials may not be copied without written permission from the SARA Members Monitor the Radio Sky 29 copyright owner. Feature Articles Radio Astronomy is available for download FFT Concepts without Calculus ‐ Bruce Randall 38 only by SARA members from the SARA web Radio and Optical Observations of Novae‐ Dave Hinzel 43 site and may not be posted anywhere else. CRIMP vs. SOLDER: PROS & CONS ~ Connections More Vital Than Ever‐ RFI 53 It is the mission of the Society of Amateur Cohoe Radio Observatory, Alaska ~ Part 4, Callisto Antenna System Radio Astronomers (SARA) to: Facilitate the Whitham D. Reeve 59 flow of information pertinent to the field of First light from student Pascal Keller, Eschenbach/Switzerland on Radio Astronomy among our members; Promote members to mentor newcomers 6‐8 June 2014‐ Christian Monstein 75 to our hobby and share the excitement of ISWI’s SID Space Weather Monitor‐ Deborah Scherrer 80 radio astronomy with other interested persons and organizations; Promote Square Law Diode Detectors in 50 ohm System‐ Glen Leinweber 85 individual and multi station observing Methods of Determining the Antenna Focal Point‐ Jeff Lichtman 88 programs; Encourage programs that DMM Data Logging‐ NRARAO‐ Steve Olney 90 enhance the technical abilities of our The Power of the Sun's Engines‐ Dr. Ethan Siegel 93 members to monitor cosmic radio signals, as well as to share and analyze such signals; RASDR update‐ Paul Oxley, David Fields, Carl Lyster, and Stan Kurtz 95 Encourage educational programs within Book Review‐ “Radio Astronomy at Long Wavelengths”‐ Whitham Reeve 100 SARA and educational outreach initiatives. Great Projects to Get Started in Radio Astronomy 104 Founded in 1981, the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, Inc. is a membership Membership supported, non‐profit [501(c) (3)], educational and scientific corporation. New Members 105 Membership Dues & Promotion 106 Copyright © 2014 by the Society of Administrative Amateur Radio Astronomers, Inc. All rights reserved Officers, directors and additional SARA contacts 108 Resources On the Cover- Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI-Grote Reber, inspired by New Web Links 109 Jansky's discovery of radio radiation coming Education Links and Resources 111 from the center of the Milky Way, built his own radio telescope in his back yard in Online Resources 112 Illinois to study this radiation. Reber was For Sale, Trade and Wanted 113 able to confirm Jansky's discovery by using a receiver at 160 MHz (1.9 meters wavelength) to detect radio emission from the Milky Way in 1938. More information http://www.nrao.edu/archives/Reber/rebe r.shtml Page of 99 May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 2 Radio Waves President’s Page This will be my last letter as President of SARA. It has been a rewarding four years as your president, getting to meet so many people with a love for radio astronomy. It is fitting that Grote Reber is on the cover of this issue, he was a pioneer in radio astronomy. He truly embodies what an amateur radio astronomer is‐ someone who observes, collects and analyses data because they love the challenge. SARA dues are up for renewal June 30 and are still just $20 a year. Your dues fund student and teacher grants for radio astronomy projects. This year your dues funded grants for four Radio Jove kits, four Itty Bitty Telescopes and 63 SuperSID systems. The value of these grants totaled over $4,700. These grants went to students and teachers in the US, Canada, Bhutan, UK, Russia and fifteen other countries around the world. Your dues also fund outreach like the 2014 USA Science & Engineering Festival where SARA had a booth. (Read about this event at http://www.radio‐astronomy.org/node/174.) SARA and Radio JOVE were at Dayton Hamvention for the fifth year in a row. This has been a great place to recruit new members for our group. Tom Crowley has set up a SARA booth at Orlando Hamcation the last several years. SARA will have a booth at the upcoming ARRL National Centennial Convention in Hartford, Connecticut on July 17‐19, 2014 https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=1248082 Thanks to our membership dues and Jon Wallace manning the booth. With the efforts of many volunteers, SARA has over 400 members from all over the world. This allows SARA to fund even more grants. I hope SARA will continue to have money for this program and never have to tell a student or teacher that we cannot help them with a radio astronomy grant project. I want to thank SARA members Whit Reeve, Curt Kinghorn, Robert Tucker, Tom Hagen, Ken Redcap, and Jon Wallace who have given radio astronomy presentations at local ham, engineering and astronomy clubs. I know there are many other members who work with local clubs explaining what radio astronomy is and how people can enjoy the hobby and I appreciate your efforts. We just completed our fifth Western Regional conference in March. The SARA members out west appreciate these events and they plan to keep on supporting these meetings. With folks like Whit Reeve, Dave Westman and Keith Payea organizing these conferences, I know they will continue to be a great success. As I step down, I know I am leaving SARA in good hands; both Ken Redcap and Tom Hagen have been avid supporters and participants in SARA. I look forward to the fresh ideas they will bring to the organization. Happy monitoring, Bill Lord KJ4SKL May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 3 Editor’s Notes We are always looking for basic radio astronomy articles, radio astronomy tutorials, theoretical articles, application and construction articles, news pertinent to radio astronomy, profiles and interviews with amateur and professional radio astronomers, book reviews, puzzles (including word challenges, riddles, and crossword puzzles), anecdotes, expository on “bad astronomy,” articles on radio astronomy observations, suggestions for reprint of articles from past journals, book reviews and other publications, and announce‐ ments of radio astronomy star parties, meetings, and outreach activities. If you would like to write an article for Radio Astronomy, please follow the Author’s Guide on the SARA web site: http://www.radio‐astronomy.org/publicat/RA‐JSARA_Author’s_ Guide.pdf. Please note that the new version of the Author’s Guide includes several changes, mostly dealing with article images. Let us know if you have questions; we are glad to assist authors with their articles and papers and will not hesitate to work with you. You may contact your editors any time via email here: editor@radio‐ astronomy.org. Please consider submitting your radio astronomy observations for publication: any object, any wavelength. Strip charts, spectrograms, magnetograms, meteor scatter records, space radar records, photographs; examples of radio frequency interference (RFI) are also welcome. Guidelines for submitting observations may be found here: http://www.radio‐astronomy.org/publicat/RA‐ JSARA_Observation_Submission_Guide.pdf Tentative Radio Astronomy due dates and distribution schedule Issue Articles Radio Waves Review Distribution Jan – Feb February 12 February 20 February 23 February 28 Mar – Apr April 12 April 20 April 25 April 30 May – Jun June 10 June 10 June 20 June 30 Jul – Aug August 12 August 20 August 25 August 31 Sep – Oct October 12 October 20 October 25 October 31 Nov – Dec December 12 December 15 December 20 December 31 HELP WANTED Want to see all the great Journal articles before anyone else? We are looking for an editor(s) for the SARA Journal. We have three very active contributing editors who write papers for the Journal and need someone who will combine all of the submittals. You do not have to be a radio astronomy expert. We have members willing to review technical articles submitted for publication. If you are interested in the position, please contact Bill Lord president@radio‐astronomy.org or call 319‐591‐ 1131. May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 4 Mark Your Calendar June 29‐ July 2, 2014 SARA Annual Conference, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia http://www.radio‐ astronomy.org/?q=node/124 July 2‐ July 4, 2014 Radio Jove Conference, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia http://www.radio‐ astronomy.org/?q=node/124 July 17‐19, 2014 ARRL National Centennial Convention, Hartford, Connecticut https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=1248082 Contact Bill Lord at ap_guardian_at_yahoo.com to volunteer. July 24‐27,2014 Stellafane at Breezy Hill in Springfield, Vermont Radio Astronomy Program by SARA John St. Louis on Saturday July 26 http://stellafane.org/convention/2014/index.html Sept 6‐7, 2014 European Conference on Amateur Radio Astronomy, Bad Münstereifel‐Eschweiler, Germany http://netcom‐bonn.de/eucara March 21‐22, 2015 SARA Western Conference at Stanford University, California Do you have an event to share with SARA members? Send information to editor@radio‐astronomy.org to be included in the next issue. European Conference on Amateur Radio Astronomy (EUCARA) Conference Announcement and Call for Papers A conference dedicated to amateurs active in radio astronomy will be held at the facilities of Astropeiler Stockert in Bad Münstereifel, Germany, on September 6th and 7th. The conference will include presentations by participants and tours with hands on demonstrations of the 25m and 10m telescopes of the host facility. A keynote speech will be presented by Dr. Silke Brixen from the Max‐Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and an excursion to the 100m Telescope in Effelsberg will take place in the afternoon of the 7th. Interested parties are invited to register for the conference by sending an email to [email protected]. The conference fee is 75 EUR including meals. Further details with the program, registration details, travelling and other background information are available at www.astropeiler.de/eucara. At this time, the organizers are also soliciting presentations/papers as contributions to the conference. Suggested contributions are requested to be sent to [email protected]. May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 5 2014 SARA Annual Conference to be Held June 29 to July 2 Radio Jove Conference July 2 to 3 at National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia, USA Conference Registration Fees: This year the Radio Jove Conference will be held immediately after the SARA conference. Anyone interested in radio astronomy is invited to attend either or both conferences. The fee for the 2014 SARA Conference has been set at U$165 for all registered participants. This fee includes Conference registration, payment of your 2015 SARA membership dues, and one copy of the published Conference Proceedings (to be distributed at the meeting), morning coffee breaks, afternoon snack breaks, evening refreshments, and eight meals, as indicated below. Lodging is NOT included. Please note that all SARA 2014 memberships expire on 15 June 2014. Since SARA Membership Dues are now inseparable from Conference registration; all registered attendees automatically become SARA Members in Good Standing through 15 June 2015. SARA Life Members, or those who have already paid their 2015 membership dues prior to registering, may deduct $20 from the above amount. Those registered for the 2014 Conference who subsequently purchase a Life Membership anytime during the 2014~2015 membership year may deduct $20 from the Life Member Fee (currently set at US$400). And, because SARA offers a special membership rate of US$5.00 for students, all fulltime students under the age of 18 may deduct US$5.00 from the above Conference registration fee. The attendance fee for an accompanying family member (non‐participating spouse, child, or companion of a registered Conference attendee) is US$80, which includes morning coffee breaks, afternoon snacks, evening refreshments, and meals. The cited fees are calculated on a break‐even basis, and apply only to advance registrations received prior to 31 May 2014. All registrations received thereafter are subject to an additional late registration fee, as indicated below. The Radio Jove Conference will be held directly following the SARA Conference on July 2 to July 4. The fee for the Radio Jove conference has been set at $75.00 for both participants and non‐participating guests or spouses. This fee includes morning coffee breaks, afternoon snack breaks, evening refreshments, and six meals, as indicated below. May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 6 Included Meal Plan: Green Bank is a small community with few dining establishments. Thus, SARA has arranged for conference registration to include a meal plan at the NRAO employee's cafeteria, to include: • Dinner Sunday night • Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner Monday and Tuesday • Breakfast on Wednesday Radio Jove conference registration includes a meal plan at the NRAO employee's cafeteria, to include: • Lunch / Dinner Wednesday • Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner Thursday • Breakfast on Friday The NRAO Cafeteria is not a public dining facility, does not sell individual meals to visitors, and is, in fact, doing us a favor in allowing our group to use their cafeteria at all. Thus, the Meal Plan is an integral part of, and inseparable from, Conference Registration. Please note that, in addition to the above meals, the Conference fee (or Accompanying Person fee) includes refreshments and coffee breaks during the Conference presentations, and snacks and beverages in the Drake Lounge in the evenings. Exceptions to the meal plan will be considered on a case‐by‐case basis, for those Conference attendees residing on site, or others with special dietary needs. Please contact our Treasurer directly with your specific requests. In general, except under unusual circumstances, one should consider the cost of meals to be a part of, and inseparable from, the conference registration fee. Conference Proceedings: Once again this year, a formal, printed Proceedings is being professionally published. One copy of the Proceedings is included in your paid Conference Registration. (Proceedings are not provided to accompanying family members.) A limited number of additional copies of this year's and previous years' Proceedings will be available at Green Bank for US$20 each. You may, if you wish, reserve and prepay additional Proceedings copies, by including the appropriate amount in your check to our Treasurer. Advance Registration Deadline: Because SARA Conferences require quite a bit of advance planning, early registration is encouraged. To register for the 2014 SARA Conference at the rates cited above, your remittance in full must be received by our Treasurer (not simply postmarked) not later than 31 May, 2014. All registrations received after that date, or walk‐in registrations, will be assessed an additional 15% late registration fee. Payment of Conference Fees: Payment for either OR both conferences can be made by check, money order, PayPal or credit card. Complete the registration form at http://www.radio‐astronomy.org/node/153 and submit with payment. Checks (in US Dollars only, drawn on a US bank) should be sent in advance to: SARA 2189 Redwood Ave Washington, IA 52353 USA May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 7 You can also make payment by going to www.PayPal.com and send money to treasurer@radio‐ astronomy.org. Additional information concerning lodging, directions and information for first time attendees can be found at this link: http://www.radio‐astronomy.org/?q=node/124 Keynote Speaker Announced Vice‐President Tom Crowley is delighted to report that Dr Joe Taylor, K1JT will be our keynote speaker at the Green Bank SARA Conference 29 June ‐ 2 July. A short bio of Dr Taylor follows: Taylor immediately went to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's telescopes in Green Bank, West Virginia, and participated in the discovery of the first pulsars discovered outside Cambridge. Since then, he has worked on all aspects of pulsar astrophysics. In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered the first pulsar in a binary system, named PSR B1913+16 after its position in the sky, during a survey for pulsars at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Although it was not understood at the time, this was also the first of what are now called recycled pulsars: neutron stars that have been spun‐ up to fast spin rates by the transfer of mass onto their surfaces from a companion star. The orbit of this binary system is slowly shrinking as it loses energy because of emission of gravitational radiation, causing its orbital period to speed up slightly. The rate of shrinkage can be precisely predicted from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and over a thirty‐year period Taylor and his colleagues have made measurements that match this prediction to much better than one percent accuracy. This was the first confirmation of the existence of gravitational radiation. There are now scores of binary pulsars known, and independent measurements have confirmed Taylor's results. Taylor has used this first binary pulsar to make high‐precision tests of general relativity. Working with his colleague Joel Weisberg, Taylor has used observations of this pulsar to demonstrate the existence of gravitational radiation in the amount and with the properties first predicted by Albert Einstein. He and Hulse shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this object. In 1980, he moved to Princeton University, where he was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Physics, having also served for six years as Dean of Faculty. He retired in 2006. Amateur Radio Joe Taylor first obtained his amateur radio license as a teenager, which led him to the field of radio astronomy. Taylor is well known in the field of amateur radio weak signal communication and was assigned the call sign K1JT by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He had previously held the call signs K2ITP, WA1LXQ, W1HFV, and VK2BJX (the latter in Australia).[2] His Amateur Radio feats have included mounting an 'expedition' in April 2010 to use the Arecibo Radio Telescope to conduct moonbounce with Amateurs around the world using voice, Morse Code, and digital communications. He wrote several computer programs and communications protocols, including WSJT ("Weak Signal/Joe Taylor"), a software package and protocol suite that utilizes computer‐generated messages in conjunction with radio transceivers to communicate over long distances with other amateur radio operators. WSJT is useful for passing short messages via non‐traditional radio communications methods, such as moonbounce and meteor scatter and other low signal‐to‐noise ratio paths. It is also useful for extremely long‐distance contacts using very low power transmissions. More information on Dr. Taylor can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor . May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 8 John Cromwell Mather PHD, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics, will visit NRAO on June 30, and will give a talk that afternoon. SARA is pleased that Dr. Mather will be speaking during the SARA conference and the SARA attendees will attend. Dr. Mather is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot. This work helped cement the big‐bang theory of the universe. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE‐project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Mather Abstracts‐ 2014 Annual SARA Conference June 29 to July 2 The following papers will be presented at the annual conference at NRAO in Green Bank, WV. Check back for late additions. An Overview of the Radio JOVE Project The Radio Jove Project Team By: Dr. Chuck Higgins Abstract: Radio JOVE is an education and outreach project intended to give students and other interested individuals a hands‐on experience in learning radio astronomy. After selling our first kit in 1999, Radio Jove has sold about 1900 radio telescopes in more than 70 countries around the world. Hardware and software has evolved in this time, and the Radio Jove Team will give a complete update and overview of the status of the program as of 2014. Specifically, we will summarize the latest hardware and software for Radio Jove, include some recent Jupiter and solar observations highlighting the data archive, and discuss some research projects for students. Finally, we will discuss some upcoming projects for Radio Jove and highlight some advanced equipment, software, and results. SETI's New Horizons by Prof. H. Paul Shuch, N6TX Executive Director Emeritus, The SETI League, Inc. Abstract: The author and his colleagues have proposed to NASA the creation and uploading of a message into the New Horizons spacecraft's memory, following a successful Pluto encounter in 2015. In the tradition of the Voyager Records now traveling through interstellar space, this message will be a self‐portrait of our planet and species, to be shared with all humanity, and potentially with intelligent species elsewhere. The message contents are being crowd‐sourced by people worldwide, and thus represent our planet as a whole. An international board of expert space scientists and engineers has determined this proposal to be technically feasible, and is currently managing all technical details. Programs for K‐12 students will also increase interest in the New Horizons interplanetary probe mission, as well as showing students how they may share in this rare chance to help make a message that will soar among the stars. Production Manufacturing Plan for the RASDR2 Appliance By: Bogdan Vacaluic Authors: Bogdan Vacaliuc, David Fields, Paul Oxley, Stan Kurtz, Carl Lyster, Ricardas Vadoklis and Zydrunas Tamosevicius. Abstract: For the last three years, SARA members have worked to construct a low cost hardware to enable radio astronomy using software defined radio (SDR) techniques. With significant contributions from Lime Microsystems, Ltd. and members of the worldwide community, the team are able to offer to SARA members May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 9 a high performance receiver appliance specifically tuned for radio frequency measurement. The presentation will describe the appliance, its bill of materials and construction as well as the plan to manufacture and distribute it to radio astronomers and educational institutions. RASDRviewer RASDR2 Control and Analysis Software By: Paul Oxley, David Fields, Stan Kurtz, Steve Berl Abstract: The Radio Astronomy Software Defined Receiver (RASDR) is a system that provides a receiver that is optimized for Radio Astronomy. RASDR2 is the current hardware that is in testing with a planned general release at this conference. See multiple other presentations at this conference as well as previous SARA Journals and Proceedings publications for the history of this SARA project. RASDRviewer is the software that controls RASDR2 and presents captured data to the user. It uses a Windows based GUI that is designed for portability to both the Linux and MAC platforms. This portability is mainly based on the use of the wxWidgets development tool that is available as open source freeware. wxWidgets abstracts most of the common graphical window objects to a common language that is applicable across all of the platforms. Thus the look and feel of the user experience is the same regardless of the platform being used. This paper describes the RASDRviewer software and documents some of the experiences in its implementation. A brief discussion of the Windows Driver and FX3 firmware is also included. RASDRviewer is an extension of the Lime Microsystems FFTviewer to optimize radio astronomy functionality. The original FFTviewer presented three charts, I & Q samples vs time, I vs Q for system verification and an output display showing results of a large Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) that operates in near real time. The FFT is capable of delivering up to 16,384 frequency bins multiple times per second. The control of the system required knowledge of the Lime chip architecture and RF engineering theory. For RASDRviewer, modifications have been made to customize the software for Radio Astronomy use. This includes optimization of control functions for radio astronomy use, addition of a Power vs Time plot, file outputs and inclusion of a simplified selection of the user options. In addition, RASDRviewer makes full use of the receive capabilities of the Lime Chip including sample rates up to 32 M Samples / Second and 28 MHz of bandwidth. RASDRviewer is being demonstrated at this conference. The demonstration will include real‐ time control of RASDR2 to produce three dimensional FFT plots. A copy of the software executable is included in the CD for this meeting. Measuring the Field Strengths of VLF Stations By: Tom Hagen Abstract: This presentation is about an attempt to get calibrated measurements of the magnetic field strengths of the various VLF stations used by the SuperSID program as reference sources to detect sudden ionospheric disturbances (SID’s). Presently, data coming in from the various SuperSID stations around the world is uncalibrated in amplitude. When a SID is detected, there is a measurable change in relative signal strength, but actual field strengths are unknown. Different stations around the world report different SID levels for a given event. Are the causes of these differences loop antennas, preamp gains, sound card settings, sound card gain, or actual differences in field strength levels? And for better system design, the typical range of field strengths would be good to know for improving and standardizing the design of pre‐ amps and loop antennas. Finally, a mathematical model is developed and verified for the Helmholtz Coil that was used for test setup calibration. May-June 2014 Radio Astronomy 10
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