Day 1

CASPER Interfacing

• Setup an RFSoC 4x2 with CASPER's tutorial image
• Installed and tested the CasperFPGA Python library to read/write registers and interact with the board
• Installed GNU Radio into the same virtual environment
• Aiming to create a Python OOT which uses this library to interact with the board and request samples
• Create an example of controlling the radio and plotting data

GNU Radio Companion CASPER Workflow

• Created gr-casper OOT module
• Added several basic blocks
• Created a template for the workflow to generate the jasper.json intermediate file

Satellite Interferometry

• IQ captured of a GEO cluster, data processing tonight
• GitHub pushes tomorrow
• Want to create a more integrated flow

Joel: Working on a lab to downlink GOES, built a 1.6m satellite dish

BLISS: Alternative processing pipeline for SETI narrowband search

• Created an example Jupyter Notebook to explain the usage

Questions:

• How to get access to IQ data to try classifying?

Day 2

Libby: Integrated CasperFPGA Python library into GNU Radio. Created an OOT block which connects to an RFSoC 4x2, configures some values, and streams spectrum data from BRAM.

Wei: Created a custom GRC Workflow to build FPGA images, successfully built a small image and validated it on hardware. Ran into an issue where port dtypes aren't flexible.

Jason: Recorded a 10 minute capture of a pulsar, processed in a few ways and identified an LTE RFI source between 835 and 825 MHz. Did successfully recover a pulsar through folding.

Joel: Implemented a pulsar folding in GNU Radio using integrated blocks. Requests the Integrate block to be improved to output the vector as it is accumulating. Matt, Jason, and Daniel commented about possibly using/abusing filters to do the accumulation. Captured several NOAA satellite images successfully using an RTLSDR and LNA with mesh dish with SDR#. Will be integrating that into a lab for the ARISE program.

Zach: Processed the data from the capture of two satellites within 40 km of each other in GEO. Successfully isolated the signals from each satellite and observed a very small drift in position over the two minute capture period. Hoping to continue analysis and make more captures to confirm the full interferometer and polarimetry functionality. Working to use the precise orbital information of a known satellite to be the reference for other transmitters in orbit.

Jonah: Took IQ recordings from a UHD LEO satellite (58342), labeled the data bursts, trained a CNN, and ran inference on a separate satellite capture. The model was able to identify multiple bursts and publish the metadata.

?Duncan: Wrote a webapp to display the metadata.

Nathan: Worked on visualizing several approaches to noise estimation. Removing the channelization filter roll off significantly improves the noise estimation 1 sigma bounds.

Dave: Assisting Nathan with SNR, rebuilding a RAID system in South Africa, Bringing up an FPGA board at the ATA.

David: Reading a paper by C Bassa about De-dispersion and thinking about how to calculate and apply it effectively and accurately. Helped many people.

Matt: Lots of good discussions on beamforming algorithms and digitization.