Week One

Show Up at Room G23 in Engineering Building 9 am Monday

There is always that first hour of "Welcome", "Introduce yourself", "This is what to expect in the coming weeks"

There are 3 College Professors, 1 graduate, and 2 undergraduates involved in running the program. There are 6 high school teachers participating in the training. We are from West Virginia (2), North Carolina, Rhode Island, Florida, and New York. We teach physics, astronomy, space and earth sciences, engineering, and biology. Two of the participants are returning from last year (I guess they liked it that much.)

Kevin Bandura- The main organizer of the program - known as Special K

First Day - First Hour

Day 1 was mainly introductory. We toured the building and the classrooms we would be using. We went to the roof to see one of the horn scopes in action...a preview of what we will be building.

Horn Scope from Last Year...Will ours be like this

After Lunch, we received a nice gift. A 2-in-1 laptop to run our equipment...and to take home with us!. Then, our grad student, Pranav, started teaching us how to use the radio equipment.

Day One Gift

An Expensive Radio

Our daily routine for a majority of our 4 weeks at WVU will be 2 lecture classes in the morning and lab in the afternoon.

DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

This class is taught by Dr. Natalia Schmid. It is meant to be an overview of the math behind the processing, and the purpose that this in the main method of making sense of the data coming in from space.

Natalia Schmid

We get to dabble with Fourier Series and Transforms....Sine and Cosine Functions...Real and imaginary numbers...Oh Boy. The stuff we are encountering in this class is stuff that a 3rd year Electrical Engineering student would dive into fully.

fourier series in 3d

There are 2 main things in the Electro-Magnetic Radiation we receive. The stuff we want (signal), and the stuff we don't (noise). In this picture I took, I wanted to emphasize that I could see the NYC skyline from Mt Beacon. Even though it was a relatively clear day, I had to deal with 50+ miles of hazy air between me and NYC. With the photo editing software, I managed to pull out the details with much more contrast.

ASTRONOMY

This class is taught by Dr. Loren Anderson. Since we will ultimately be looking for neutral Hydrogen in plane of the Milky Way Galaxy with our horn telescopes, he will be dissecting a first year general astronomy course to incorporate the coordinates of the celestial sky and where to look from our location on Earth...details about the Milky Way Galaxy and the nature of Hydrogen gas.

Loren Anderson

Skies and Spheres

On Friday, we were able to go to WVU's planetarium to explore the coordinate systems in 3D.

WVU Planetarium

New Age Planetarium Projector

WVU 14 inch Telescope

We had to go to the main campus for the planetarium, so we had to find some lunch before returning.

Going to High Street for Lunch

LAB-GNURADIO-SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO
After lunch, our efforts will be hands-on work to program our computers to process the data we receive from our horn telescopes (which will be built in Week 2). We have the leadership of mighty EE grad student, Pranav!

Pranav

Here are a few shots of some of the fine things we have worked on so far. As I type this, I am listening to a local radio station on my new laptop (you saw the picture earlier).

Sources, filters, amplifiers, demodulators, Fast Fourier Transforms....lots to learn here in the coming weeks.

Screen Shot of Radio Station Strengths

GnuRadio Programming

Resulting Wave Pattern from Program