Wow@Home – Network of Amateur Radio Telescopes(phl.upr.edu) |
Wow@Home – Network of Amateur Radio Telescopes(phl.upr.edu) |
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
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.
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, …)
What is lacking, or I cannot find, yet, is steps for me to take or contribute.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Best regards =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5uV6zI_978
https://github.com/AP-HLine-3D/HLine3D
I've also seen this on human texts, but only quite long ago
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.
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.
If you're content with that, then bully for you. The rest of us want words written by humans.
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.
If someone can't be bothered to write the copy for their project, 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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.