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Teachers built radio telescopes here

DSPIRA — Digital Signal Processing in Radio Astronomy — was an NSF Research Experiences for Teachers site run by the lab with the WVU Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology and the Green Bank Observatory. Over three summers, high school teachers built working horn radio telescopes, learned the same open-source signal-processing tools the lab uses on real instruments, and wrote classroom lessons around them.

The cohort program ran from 2017 to 2019 and has concluded. The curriculum it produced is still online, still maintained, and free for anyone to use.

Still available

The lessons are still here

Everything the program produced is public: 44 lessons across nine modules, covering the astronomy, the hardware, the signal processing, and the labs. Written for high school teachers, but used by students and hobbyists too.

  • Astronomy
  • Horn construction
  • Horn operation
  • Telescope hardware setup
  • Telescope software setup
  • Telescope operation
  • Digital signal processing
  • GNU Radio & Raspberry Pi
  • Labs
Open the lessons site
Summers
32017, 2018 and 2019
Teachers
15Across 21 cohort places
Home states
8CA, FL, MD, NC, NY, RI, TX, WV
Lessons published
44Free, open, still online

How it worked

Six weeks, one telescope each

Teachers spent the summer doing engineering rather than reading about it, finishing at Green Bank with an instrument they had built themselves.

  1. Build the telescope

    Each teacher assembled a horn antenna and a low-noise amplifier from sheet metal and off-the-shelf parts, then tested it in the RF lab at WVU.

  2. Learn the tools

    GNU Radio, Python and software-defined radio — the same open-source stack the lab uses to commission real instruments, not a teaching substitute.

  3. Observe

    Six weeks ended at Green Bank, mapping neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way with the horn they had built, alongside the observatory's own telescopes.

  4. Take it back to class

    Each cohort wrote lessons and classroom exercises from what they had done, and continued the projects with their own students during the school year.

Who came

Three cohorts

15 teachers from 8 states filled 21 places — four of them came back for a second or third summer.

2019

6 teachers
  • John Makous NCreturning
  • Howard Chun RIreturning
  • Tad Herman NYreturning
  • John Clarke FLreturning
  • Robert Baker CA
  • Michael Stover WV
2019 summer

2018

6 teachers
  • John Makous NCreturning
  • Howard Chun RIreturning
  • Alexis Emch WV
  • Daniel Bonnette WV
  • Tad Herman NY
  • John Clarke FL

Joined by two undergraduate researchers, from WVU and Toronto

2018 summer

2017

9 teachers
  • Jamie Avalos TX
  • Howard Chun RI
  • Denise Gipson WV
  • Eric Goff WV
  • Wendy Lee WV
  • John Makous NC
  • Adam Osborne WV
  • Shane Price WV
  • LaShonda Torbert MD
2017 summer

What came out of it

Published & presented

Teachers did not just attend — they co-authored the conference paper and gave the conference talk.

Who ran it

DSPIRA was a partnership between the university and the observatory next door.

  • Investigators Natalia Schmid and Kevin Bandura
  • GBO coordinator Richard Prestage
  • Partners WVU Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
    WVU Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology
    Green Bank Observatory
  • Funding National Science Foundation
    Research Experiences for Teachers

Earlier sites DSPIRA course site (2019 labs) Classroom Radio Astronomy

Join the lab

Students build real
instruments here.

If you're a graduate or undergraduate student who wants hands-on work with radio telescopes — analog front ends, FPGA signal processing, or the software that turns raw voltages into science — we'd like to hear from you.

Email the lab See our code
  • Lab Advanced Engineering Research Building, Room 304
    WVU Evansdale Campus, Morgantown, WV
  • Department Lane Department of Computer Science
    and Electrical Engineering