Create Autograph Radio with airSlate SignNow

Create autograph radio

[Music] hi I'm Tom Hagen I'm member of the McMath Hobart Astronomical Society and we meet here at the historic McMath Hobart solar observatory in Lake Angelus Michigan and today we're going to show you our homemade radio telescope that we use can detect the emissions of the hydrogen gas in the Milky Way galaxy that's our home galaxy so what we have here is a representation of a hydrogen atom this could be a hydrogen atom weigh out thousands of light years away in our galaxy the hydrogen atom is the simplest atom it consists just of one proton and one electron the protons in the middle and the electron is here and it's orbiting the proton the proton and the electron have these quantum quantities called spin this is related to the quantum angular momentum of each particle spin can have it have two directions it can be either up or down in the picture here we see proton the protons spin is pointing up the electron spin is pointing up now when the electron flips it emits a photon of a certain energy level and that corresponds to a wavelength of 21 centimeters when this flip happens a photon is emitted and we can detect this energy on earth from untold trillions and trillions of these hydrogen atoms that are out there in the galaxy okay so here is the radio telescope itself we built this ourselves right here at McMath Alberta in our shop and this is an antenna called a horn antenna and what it is it's basically a funnel for radio frequency energy we're trying to detect radio frequency energy that is generated by the hydrogen atoms in our Milky Way galaxy that's our home galaxy so when I point this up to the sky the energy just falls in here and we can pick it up down at the end down there and we can detect the signal strength so pointed up we can detect whether or not we're just seeing hydrogen in the sky from the Milky Way so if you come in a bit closer here this is all all these materials are available at Home Depot that's where we got them the the the uprights here are 3/4 inch birch plywood the base is made out of some ESPA night that we had is scrapped here it's about 40 inches in diameter on the top we have another plate that sits on the ground circular plate that plate has Castor's mounted on it so that we can turn it back and forth in azimuth the altitude axis is made up of these toilet flanges PVC toilet pages from Home Depot more 3/4 inch birch plywood the horn itself is made out of one-inch aluminum angle screwed together the the metal here is 26 gauge sheet metal again all this is available at Home Depot the design of the horn itself comes from an organization that's been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence extraterrestrial radio signals I took their design I modified a little bit I ended this tail piece back here which is where the antenna itself is so that I have a better antenna pattern a better pattern as it looks up into the sky again to reiterate this is basically it's just a sensor even though it's called a telescope we don't make pictures with okay looking inside the horn you can see how its assembled with screws and it's held together basically by this aluminium angle this 1 inch aluminum angle material on the corners we miter the joints and we have double angled here all the way around so this makes the the front end really stiff if you didn't do it that way this thing would tend to be a little bit floppy the pieces were cut with a aviation snips so it is kind of a rough edge there but I was careful when I built it to turn the rough Inge's inside so that you don't have the problem and then down at the end here this is where the signal is detected and we have this little probe here that is tuned to the wavelength of the frequency that we are trying to receive that wavelength wavelength is 21 centimeters that is a known emu in line of hydrogen atoms okay so here is where the active element comes out of the tail piece here and it hooks to this piece of coaxial cable and it comes out here and goes up here to this preamplifier which is a little amplifier board inside this this metal box here this board amplifies the signal by about a thousand times the signal comes in here and it goes out here and then we hook our radio detector to this output coax here this other wire here supplies power you power the amplifier as it is we have about 12 volts DC input coming in here okay so basically this little device here is the actual receiver that we hook our output signal to from the antenna this is called a software-defined radio dongle this is a device that plugs into the USB port of a personal computer plug it in here and we can use software to communicate with it and set it up to receive the signal that we want that we're looking for that way I want it I want the device to be very close to the antenna because that improves the noise performance of the system when I do that that way so I just screw the coaxial just like this and then I bring a lawn collector up USB cable from the device and then I plug it in next thing I need is I need to connect power to the preamp through this fairly long wire just plug it in right here like that so there that's the mosula connections at the horn itself okay so now we have the set up is powered up assembled and operation we started the software on the this is a Linux computer running ubuntu and we're running an application called the new radio that communicates with our receiver over here at the horn itself the display on the laptop here it's a little hard to see here but it will have some screenshots of it for you to look at this is the signal and we're on the horizontal axis we're displaying frequency and then on the vertical axis this is relative strength so if you can see this right here we have a little bit of a bump here and that is the signature of the hydrogen atom in space now to make it a little bit easier to see we can do signal averaging what's called averaging and we're averaging 40 some signals over time here and as you can see this allows our signal to show up a lot better okay in this slide we're showing the output that the operator sees on the laptop this is the output from the radio telescope the dark green line here is the actual signal from the receiver we have frequency scale along the bottom and then on the y-axis we're showing a relative power so this is a fairly noisy signal and what we have here is the signature of hydrogen basically it shows up as a bump along here now it's not very clear here because the signal is pretty noisy but you can see a little little bit of a rise here you [Music] now here in this shot we're using the averaging function of the software and the receive signal of the h1 line the hydrogen line is much more prominent so this is how we use the radio telescope to detect hydrogen emissions from the Milky Way galaxy so in conclusion I'd like to invite you to visit us at McMath albergue org for more information on how to build a radio telescope we're very happy to help everybody who wants to do this especially students so again it's a visit like math Hobart dot org thank you [Music] you