Wow@Home – Network of Amateur Radio Telescopes | Hacker News Reader

Wow@Home – Network of Amateur Radio Telescopes

phl.upr.edu

196 pointsvisviva35 comments

This is a bit like a scaled down (in terms of telescope size) Project Argus [1]. You could probably use the SARA ‘scope in a box’ [2] to do it, too, which is slight;y cheaper than the projected cost ($350 vs $500) assuming you have a spare r-pi hanging around. The far lower cost of entry will probably make it a lot more popular though - not to mention finding satellite dishes of that size is becoming harder by the year..

About 2 decades ago, I had a Project Argus setup taking up most of my back yard [3]. I moved to the US when Apple bought my company, and had it packed up to take with me, thinking (in my naivety) that all US dwellings would have way more space than the terraced house I was living in (in London) and I could use it there too. Gentle reader, I was wrong. That dish has remained in its packing crate since it arrived all that time ago.

I leave the US to return permanently to the UK on 4th July (yes, yes…). Once I’m settled, bought a new house, and have the kids schooling sorted out, I’ll definitely be looking to get it up and running again, to rise, phoenix-like, and stare boldly into the abyss once more.

1: https://www.setileague.org/argus/

2: https://radio-astronomy.org/store/projects/scope-in-a-box

3: https://imgur.com/pCJvp9C

> thinking (in my naivety) that all US dwellings would have way more space than the terraced house I was living in

As you've no doubt discovered, this highly depends on where you live. In a major US city? You're going to pay a premium for yard space. In rural Tennessee? Not so much.

Oh $deity yes, I was rapidly disabused of the notion, given I was living in San Jose or Cupertino, or Mountain View, … or anywhere in reasonable traveling time to the Apple campus, really.

Going to buy a place by the beach in the UK, with a little (half acre or so) land, and plenty of space (for Space :) now that I’m retiring. I have an interest in optical astrophotography too, so as low a Bortle sky as I can finagle given the other constraints (school proximity, wife’s opinion, …)

Perhaps an opportunity for more models like remote colocation of equipment, either for profit or non profit.

https://starfront.space/

Thanks. I have a few remote sites on my list for where to go eventually, but I’d not come across this one.

This is so cool. As someone who used to run SETI@Home, this is exciting and I'll be doing what I can when they're ready for me.

What is lacking, or I cannot find, yet, is steps for me to take or contribute.

From the bottom of the FAQ at the end of the page:

How can I help?

We welcome help, especially from those with experience in RFI shielding and software GUI development. Your expertise could make a big difference as we refine both the hardware and user interface. While we’re actively pursuing funding to support the project long term, any assistance now would accelerate our progress and broaden the impact of Wow@Home. Whether it’s technical support, outreach, or collaboration, your contribution matters.

The next step for a project like this would be to incorporate a better, perhaps bepsoke SDR device more focused on the astronomy to be performed as most small off the shelf RTLSDR dongles have pretty horrible frequency drift. The addition of a more stable local clock source, coupled with a GPSDO - GPS disciplined oscillator - would allow signals to be correlated in time across many stations and allow for some actual, albeit basic, interferometry / aperture synthesis.

I think that is what is needed for some actual science to be done with this kind of hardware and community support - similar to the work done by amateurs hosting hardware to record sferics in the VLF bands that sync up over the internet to do lightning strike tracking.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/discovery-dish

The original v4 RTL-SDR has a 1PPM TCXO. The problem is, the tons of shady clones don't.

As for the GPSDO, that should be easy to solve at least if the host platform is a Raspberry Pi - the SparkFun NEO-M9N board can be connected to the PPS input of the Pi. The problem is, that thing is expensive.

[1] https://www.berrybase.de/sparkfun-qwiic-gps-breakout-neo-m9n...

I'm not an interferometry expert, so I don't know what level of precision is required, but usually a GPSDO takes a lot more than a PPS output.

A PPS output makes for very accurate timekeeping over long time scales. A GPSDO is a very stable oscillator that gives you precise frequency.

Disciplining your oscillator with a PPS signal would be much harder than with the typically used 10 MHz signal. And I don't think an RPi would do very good at putting out a highly stable MHz signal disciplined to a PPS input.

I would love to build something like this, but it looks like the project is not quite complete yet? And also I don't see anywhere on the page where I can sign up for updates.

Would recommend getting a Ham technician license, as it will prepare you to understand the LNA and filter hardware.

Best regards =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5uV6zI_978

https://github.com/AP-HLine-3D/HLine3D

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/

https://github.com/byggemandboesen/H-line-software

I do have a ham license! I just need something to do with it haha.

I reached out via email and got some more information and added to a mailing list. I'm glad they added the FAQ, it answers a few of the questions I had.

At the risk of retracting from the really cool project, I notice that a lot of highlighted phrases in a text is indicative of an LLM writer. Not that I have anything against that.

That would also fit because the image on the top is very clearly AI generated. I find that quite off-putting to be honest.

As long as the content is great, this doesn‘t matter at all. It helps especially non-native speakers a lot to clearly communicate their ideas. And it saves time for the important work. We should get used to it as fast as we can.

If you’re not going to write it, why should I read it?

No-one is forcing you to.

Not everyone who has the knowledge of how to put together a radio telescope is also awesome at creating a website. It seems everyone is a critic, these days…

And if you don’t think that having an appealing website is at least as important as the content within when doing outreach, I may have a bridge to sell you.

They don't need to be awesome, they just need to write their own words.

If someone can't be bothered to write the copy for their project, what else have they handed over to an LLM?

> what else have they handed over to an LLM?

A version in their own language or with lots of spelling mistakes that take people out of the story as well

(Charitably, that is)

ChatGPT is a better writer than me. Simple as that. It takes my words and ideas and communicates them more effectively.

They're still my words and ideas being fed to it. It just transforms them into something others enjoy reading. It asks me questions I forgot to answer. Etc.

No it doesn't. It makes them average. It regresses as far as it can to the mean because that's what it does.

It has no creativity, it cannot think. It has no idea what is right, only that it can make your input look like the corpus of data that it has been trained on.

If you think that's better, then that's your look out.

I find ChatGPT is a fairly mediocre writer: It uses a lot of overwrought and exaggerated language that becomes fatiguing rather quickly.

It's also frequently used by fraudsters and in spam, so you run a real risk of 'your' writing style giving unintended impressions when you rely on it.

When I say it's a better writer...I really mean it's a faster writer. It's a tool. You can ask for 15 variations on a sentence, ask it to be more or less concise, or to tailor it to a certain audience. Ask it for 5 ways to communicate a stronger feeling of X. Etc.

If you just blindly ask it to write it isn't great. It has far greater writing ability than I do but it doesn't know what's good and what isn't, it needs guidance.

I agree with this. That's how I use AI's writing -- to enhance my own writing.

I write a first draft, AI revises it, I rework a second draft, AI revises it, then I curate a final draft. That's my typical AI-enhanced writing process. AI can even provide multiple variations of each revision, from which I incorporate the best content from each back into my own writing.

The combination of my ability to pick what's good and AI's ability to quickly come up with numerous options creates a better result than I could on my own with a similar amount of effort.

That sentence sounds nice but what does it even mean?

Does the value of written content come from it being written by a human, or the fact that it's enjoyable to read and/or transfers useful information/knowledge? Whether a person wrote it or not is irrelevant. It's almost like complaining someone used a typewriter instead of hand writing something.

It's entirely relevant. If you've chucked a prompt at ChatGPT and called it a day, the output is an approximation of human thought. There is no originality, it is text vomited onto a page that may, or may not, resemble human creativity.

If you're content with that, then bully for you. The rest of us want words written by humans.

If you’re not going to write it in assembly, why should I use your software?

You think that's why every sentence (outside of figure captions and intro) has a bold part? It's sprinkled throughout so much that it hinders regular reading (or maybe that's just me? I find it really hard to read any paragraph at normal speed and not get distracted and skip to a bold part only to be missing context) and anyone looking to read the important bit is not aided in any way

I've also seen this on human texts, but only quite long ago

Nice to see that this project came from the University of Puerto Rico! The university has a cluster of activity in astronomy thanks to the legacy of the Arecibo telescope.

eso es!

Seeing the title I was a bit bummed seeing radio telescopes and what happened with the radio telescope there. Clicking the link, I was really happy to see upr.edu domain and then the title, 'PHL @ UPR Arecibo'.

I like the legacy that the radio telescope has left behind and I'm very happy to see others there working with radio.

This is awesome! Built a radio telescope during covid thanks to someone posting some cool raspberry pi project here on hacker news.

Does not need... gets wallet

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