The Wildwood Institute for STEM Research and Development is a student research lab in Los Angeles. Its radio astronomy group built this hardware and then went somewhere the DSPIRA curriculum does not: they run the telescopes next to a Quarknet cosmic ray detector, looking for radio bursts that arrive at the same moment as an air shower.
The physics they are chasing is that a high-energy particle cascade through the atmosphere is thought to radiate — Cherenkov and bremsstrahlung — so a cosmic ray shower and a radio transient should sometimes be the same event seen two ways. Detecting the coincidence is the hard part, and it is a genuinely open question rather than a classroom exercise with a known answer.
What they have published
Preparations for the Detection of Radio Waves Created by High-Energy Cosmic Rays using the WISRD Cosmic Ray Detector — L. Perttula, R. Cortez, S. Zohar, J. Reis and J. A. Wise. The opening paper of the WISRD Research & Engineering Journal, Volume 4 Issue 1, Spring 2022, pages 2 to 12. It covers the Quarknet detector — four scintillators on photomultiplier tubes, with a FermiLab data acquisition board — how they calibrated it, and how they are pairing it with the radio telescopes.
Cosmic ray detector calibration, spring 2023 — a progress poster. They are replacing a voltage box and stepper motors with a Raspberry Pi driving digital potentiometers so the detectors can be calibrated remotely, and they report an unexplained oscillation in the rate of anomalous events they are still chasing down.
If you want to try this
Coincidence detection is what the radio_astro event blocks were written for —
detect, dedispersion, correlate and the triggered CSV sink are in
gr-radio_astro, and the
LightWork memo series covers the event-capture
side in memos 023 and 027.
The group’s own site is at wisrd.org.