Creating a low cost Ozone Spectrometer out of RTL-SDR’s to measure mesospheric winds and tides

Over at the MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford Massachusetts, researchers O.B Alam and A.E.E Rogers have been working on creating a low cost ground based Ozone spectrometer out of RTL-SDR dongles (pdf warning). An Ozone spectrometer is used by scientists to measure the concentration, velocity and temperature of the ozone gasses in the mesosphere (50 – 85 km above the ground) and lower thermosphere (85 km+) at the Ozone line frequency of 11072.4545 MHz.

The spectrometer the researchers built consists of a satellite TV parabolic reflector dish with 46.72cm diameter, 9750 MHz LNBF, two Bias Tees, two 740 MHz high pass filters, two 8dB attenuators, a calibration pulse generator, an Intel NUC mini PC and three R820T RTL-SDR dongles.

RTL-SDR based Ozone Spectrometer block diagram from the MIT Haystack Observatory.
RTL-SDR based Ozone Spectrometer block diagram from the MIT Haystack Observatory.
Photo of some of the components of the ozone spectrometer.
Photo of some of the components of the ozone spectrometer.

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