Tagged: Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers

The Latest Talks from the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers

Over on YouTube a bunch of new talks from the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers (SARA) have recently been uploaded from their recent SARA Western Conference that was held in April 2024. The talks typically involve small home-based radio astronomy setups that use small satellite or WiFi dishes and RTL-SDR or similar low-priced SDRs in their setup. Some of the latest talks include:

  • Nathan Butts: A Novice's Guide to Radio Astronomy (Link)
  • Dr Andrew Thornett: Detecting Cosmic Rays & Building your own version of the Large Hadron Collider (Link)
  • Dr Andrew Thornett M6THO: Lichfield Radio Observatory - Mapping Milky Way at 1420.405 MHz (Hydrogen) (Link)
  • Bruce Randall: IBT Eclipse and other Radio astronomy Failures (Link)
  • Felicia Lin: Mapping the Milky Way by Cross Section Data (Link)
  • Kent Britain WA5VJB: Antennas for Radio Astronomy (Link)
  • Charles Osborne: Eclipse Detection using a VLF Receiver (Link)
  • Rob Lucas - Eclipse Research (Link)
  • Dr Wolfgang Herrmann: Lunar Occultation Observation of Radio Sources (Link)
  • Keynote: Dr Linsay King - Gravitational Lensing (Link)

We note that the last talk was uploaded only a few hours ago at the time of this post, so we're not sure if more talks are yet to be uploaded. So please keep an eye on the SARA YouTube videos page.

Nathan Butts: A Novice's Guide to Radio Astronomy

Radio Jove Spectrograph Hardware and Software

NASA's Radio Jove is a project that enables students and amateur scientists from around the world to observe and analyze the HF radio emissions from Jupiter, our Sun and our galaxy using easy to construct HF radio telescopes that receive spectrographs from 16-24 MHz. The project has existed for more than two decades, and these days the telescope builds mostly make use of low cost software defined radios.

In a presentation for the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers (SARA) Richard Flagg & Jim Sky talk about what sort of hardware is used these days for the Radio Jove project. They note that SDRs like the Softrock, Funcube Dongle Pro+, SDR-IQ, SDR-14, RTL-SDR, and RASDR have been used. They go on to discuss some of the spectrograph logging software that is used with the project as well.

The presentation slides in PDF form can be found here.

Richard Flagg & Jim Sky: Radio Jove Spectrograph Hardware and Software (RJ10/11)