Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers
Visit SARA Booth at Dayton Hamvention
During May 18 to 20, the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers will have an exhibit at the annual Hamvention in Dayton, OH. One of the biggest gatherings of radio amateurs in the world, this event draws thousands of visitors each year.
SARA will share an exhibit booth with the Radio JOVE Project. Look for us at Booth #421 in the Ball Arena. (See http://www.hamvention.org/about.php for more details.)
Summary of 2012 SARA Western Conference, 24 – 25 March
by Julian Jove
The SARA 2012 Western Conference was held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA (aerial photo right © aerialarchives.com/Alamy). Debra Scherrer, Coordinator of the Stanford Solar Center, helped us obtain facilities at the Physics and Astrophysics building on the Stanford campus. We used the same room as the 2010 Western Conference, so we were in a familiar setting.
2012 Annual Conference Abstracts
The following abstracts will be presented at the 2012 SARA Annual Conference in Green Bank, West Virginia June 24 to 27.
RASDR Development Status
Bogdan Vacaliuc, David Fields, Paul Oxley, Marcus Leech, and Stan Kurtz
Abstract
SARA members are working on designs for a Software Defined Radio (SDR) that is optimized for Radio Astronomy. The resulting receiver design, RASDR, has the potential to be a common digital receiver interface useful to many SARA members. A benchtop version of RASDR has been completed. This “Phase 0” RASDR provides digitized radio data to a backend computer through a USB 2.0 interface. One component of RASDR is the Lime Microsystems Femtocell chip which tunes from a 0.4-4 GHz center frequency with several selectable bandwidths from 0.75 MHz to 14
Keynote Speaker Announced for Annual Conference
We have a commitment from Dr. Namir E. Kassim as our keynote speaker for the annual conference to be held June 24 to 27. Dr. Namir E. Kassim received his B.Sc. from MIT in 1980 in physics, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1987 in astronomy. His thesis research was a survey of our Milky Way Galaxy at a wavelength of 10 meters under the supervision of low frequency radio pioneer Professor William C. Erickson. His scientific interests include low frequency radio astrophysics, large HF/VHF arrays, and HF/VHF Adaptive Optics. He has authored over 100 refereed journal articles in low frequency astronomy, several books and book chapters, and numerous conference proceedings.