Software Beacon Receiver Team Activities
Weekly Team Meeting
Tuesdays at 2pm in conference room D
Purpose : Each team member will update everyone on activities from the last week, raise any issues, and the group will make decisions
Weekly Journal Club
Friday at 2pm outside conference room D
Purpose : Discuss a specified paper or section of a paper
Everyone will read the paper which will be distributed about a week in advance
One student will be designated to summarize the key points of the paper or section
Each student must come prepared with two questions about the content to be discussed
Each advisor will come with answers or insight
Group Activity #1 : Specification of Beacon Receiver Design (2 weeks ; design review approximately June 15th)
The group will work to specify the design of the Beacon Receiver with the guidance of the advisors. The goal is to have a well specified design ready within two weeks. An informal design review will then be conducted to identify what will be implemented. After this design review there will be a week to incorporate and decide any changes to the design and implementation plan. A final review prior to implementation will be done on or about June 22nd (just prior to CEDAR).
Baseline things to include in the specification :
The group will specify the components, interfaces, and elements necessary to accomplish the project goals.
A baseline catalog of satellites, beacons, and ephemeris
Specification of the received signal characteristics for existing satellite beacons
Specification of the hardware requirements for making S4, SigmaPhi, and IEC/TEC measurements
Specification of the software interface to the tuner hardware
Specification of the meta information required to understand the S4, SigmaPhi, and IEC/TEC measurements
Specification of the interface between the tuner and the signal processing
Specification of the interface between the signal processing and the database
Specification of the typical visualization modes to be provided by the database
Estimates of the information bandwidths and storage requirements needed at each interface stage
A specification for calibrations required to understand the data
A test plan for each component of the project
An integration plan for combining each stage, for combining groups of stages, and an end to end test plan
A list of tasks and task assignments including potential tasks/assignments for advisors (negotiated)
An approximate implementation schedule for the tasks
Develop a standard data and metadata representation, namespace, and planned HDF5 serialization.
To accomplish the above items it is likely that the group will need to :
Research characteristics of beacon satellites.
Obtain beacon satellite TLEs and create software to predict overflights.
Calculate expected beacon signal levels and expected doppler shifts.
Evaluate range of doppler shifts and levels for a variety of different station locations.
Contact Paul Bernhardt at NRL to arrange 1066 MHz beacon activation over Millstone during a test overflight.
Setup turnstile antennas, MIDAS-M amplifiers and filters, and obtain beacon signal overflights using spectral analyzer.
Obtain beacon signals during overflights using MIDAS-M software radio platform and prototype tuner.
Compare signal levels to predictions. Evalute signal to noise ratios, bandwidths, typical pass characteristics.
Group Activity #2 : Integration and Testing