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Cohort archive

2018

The second summer

Six teachers — two of them back for another year — redesigned the horn mount, ran eight experiments at Green Bank, and taught three groups of students.

  • 6teachers
  • 5states
  • 2returning
  • 6weeks
  • Morgantown + Green Bank
DSPIRA teachers observing with a horn antenna at the Green Bank Observatory in 2018
Observing with a teacher-built horn at Green Bank.

Who was here

The 2018 cohort

Six teachers, two of whom had done the program the summer before and came back to go deeper. Two undergraduate researchers joined them for the season.

The 2018 DSPIRA teacher cohort assembled outdoors
The 2018 cohort.
  1. John Makousreturning NC
  2. Howard Chunreturning RI
  3. Alexis Emch WV
  4. Daniel Bonnette WV
  5. Tad Herman NY
  6. John Clarke FL

Joined by two undergraduate researchers, from WVU and Toronto

01

Foundation

As in 2017, the first four weeks were daily lectures building a foundation in astronomy and digital signal processing — the celestial sphere, astronomical and solar time, Kepler's laws, the H–R diagram, galaxies, dark matter and galaxy rotation curves on one side; signal basics through to the fast Fourier transform, modeled on an undergraduate DSP course, on the other.

This cohort also set aside dedicated time to write lesson plans and classroom activities, working out how to fold signal processing into what they already teach day to day.

02

The laboratory sessions

Every lecture was followed by a lab. This year the 2017 material was revisited, but far more time went on mastering it rather than getting through it. The labs make abstract DSP concepts tangible through software-defined radio: GNU Radio is free and open source, runs on cheap off-the-shelf hardware, and the structured sequence ends with each teacher writing their own software spectrometer.

They then built the telescope — soldering a low-noise amplifier from very small components, and fabricating a horn antenna from materials and tools you can buy at a hardware store. The horns were built in the industrial design workshop at WVU, again as an assembly line. Between the spectrometer, the LNA and the horn, every teacher had a working radio telescope by the end of the four weeks.

One thing this cohort added: they designed and built a new iterative horn antenna mount themselves. Testing followed at WVU, with LNA performance measured in the lab and the noise figure taken inside the Faraday cage in the RF room.

The two returning teachers spent their second summer going a level deeper into software-defined radio for radio astronomy — learning the internals of GNU Radio well enough to write their own blocks and programs, streamlining the data acquisition, and building DSP teaching tools inside GNU Radio.

  • A surface-mount amplifier component a couple of millimeters across, balanced on a fingertip above a printed assembly sheet
    The parts you solder are a couple of millimeters across.
  • Macro photograph of an amplifier circuit board laid beside a ruler showing millimeter divisions
    Against a millimeter scale.
  • The industrial design workshop at WVU, with teachers working at benches
    The workshop at WVU, where the horns were built.
  • Two teachers laying out and marking sheet material for a horn antenna on a large table
    Marking out.
  • A teacher holding a length of timber cut for a horn antenna mount
    Cutting the mount — this cohort redesigned it.
  • Looking into the open end of a completed horn antenna, its internal bracing visible
    Looking into a finished horn.
  • Six completed horn antennas standing on their wooden mounts on the workshop floor
    The assembly line's output: one working telescope each.
  • Teachers testing two horn antennas on the grass outside a brick building at WVU
    First tests, straight outside the building.
  • Teachers working with laptops beside horn antennas in a covered doorway
    Data acquisition, worked out on the spot.

03

Science experiments

The horns were tested in Morgantown, then taken to the Green Bank Observatory for the last two weeks. The teachers went through the observatory's outreach program, including training on the 40 Foot telescope — and tapped its signal, routing it through the SDR dongle and the GNU Radio spectrometer they had written at WVU.

Most of the time went on observing with the horns. The teachers wrote their own plan to map the whole sky, and used the facilities on site to keep improving the instrument. Eight distinct experiments came out of the two weeks:

  • Comparative analysis of LNA performance
  • Comparative analysis of horn response
  • Optimization of horns
  • Optimization of data acquisition software
  • Analog data from the 40 Foot vs. the digital GNU Radio back end
  • Measuring the horn beam pattern
  • Milky Way velocity curve
  • All-sky map of neutral hydrogen
Teachers at work in an equipment room at the Green Bank Observatory, one of them writing at a chalkboard
Working through the observatory's own equipment.
Three horn antennas on wooden mounts under a canopy on the lawn at Green Bank, with teachers at laptops beside them
The observing site, set up on the lawn.
Horn antennas lit against the dark during a night-time observing run at Green Bank
Observing ran into the night.
Teachers gathered at a large circular opening in a concrete structure at the Green Bank Observatory
The observatory opened up more than its telescopes.
Horn antennas spread across the lawn beside a white canopy at the Green Bank Observatory
Two weeks of observing, inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.

04

Students and lessons

While at Green Bank, the cohort worked with the West Virginia Governor's STEM Academy — a chance to turn the research experience straight into lesson plans and run them. They taught DSP in radio astronomy through a series of hands-on activities across a couple of days, with three separate groups of students.

  • A large room of students seated on the floor around a horn antenna during a DSPIRA session
  • Students working at laptops in a classroom during a DSPIRA session
  • A DSPIRA teacher working with students in a classroom, plots projected on the screen behind
  • A DSPIRA teacher presenting to students with spectrometer output on the projector screen
  • Students working along a long table during a DSPIRA session at Green Bank
  • Students at a table with a table of measurements projected on the screen behind them
  • Students standing around long tables working through a hands-on exercise
  • A DSPIRA teacher setting up an activity with students at a table
  • Students and a DSPIRA teacher gathered around a tripod-mounted instrument
  • Two DSPIRA teachers comparing results on a laptop by a window

From the inside

Tad Herman kept a blog

One of the 2018 teachers wrote up the whole summer, day by day, as it happened.

Read the blog

05

Undergraduate research

The 2018 program also took on two undergraduates — Andy Dycke from the University of Toronto and Rhys Lockhart from West Virginia University. They took the same inexpensive horn hardware and pointed it at a harder problem: detecting radio transients.

Working with an aperture array of horns and custom data acquisition software, they set out to detect the brightest pulsars — turning a classroom instrument into a time-domain one.

An undergraduate researcher working at a laptop outdoors, a horn aperture array set up in the field behind him
Running the aperture array in the field.
Researchers working at computers in the lab on the pulsar detection data
And back in the lab, with the data.

Everything they used

The lessons are still online

44 lessons covering the astronomy, the hardware, the signal processing and the labs — free, and still maintained.

Open the lessons site

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