Page Created: 2010 June 29
Page Last Updated: 2012 May 07

Welcome to Starlight Cascade Observatory Radio Jove Project !
Near Yarker, Ontario, Canada. (44.22.39 N 76.45.47 W    155M Elevation)

Radio Jove

Radio JOVE students and amateur scientists observe and analyze natural radio emissions of Jupiter, the Sun, and our galaxy.
The Radio JOVE project is a hands-on inquiry-based educational project that allows students, teachers and the general public to learn about radio astronomy by building their own radio telescope from an inexpensive kit and/or using remote radio telescopes through the internet. Participants also collaborate with each other through interactions and sharing of data on the network. The Radio JOVE project began in 1998. Since then, more than 1100 teams of students and interested individuals have purchased our non-profit radio telescope kits and are learning radio astronomy by building and operating a radio telescope. This self-supporting program continues to thrive and inspire new groups of students as well as individuals.
Most recent SkyPipe strip charts (updates hourly - times listed immediately preceeding the filename are Eastern Time (UT-5)) skypipedata.htm
May 18 13:04 skypipepic.jpg May 18 13:04 skypipepicfv.jpg
Most recent 30 minute strip chart

  • last 48 images - page * archive of last48.htm

    • Most recent daily strip chart (00:00 to present UT)
    Image/data/graph archive * audio archive

    Where is Jupiter now? from http://www.physics.sfasu.edu/astro/Planets/planetchart.html

    Recent News

  • 2012may07 - autouploads have broken since about april 29th. We are working on alternatives.
  • 2012april03 - change options timing from windows to sound card, enabled 10 second prebuffer for any audio recordings. Works! Moved upper threshold limit from 800 to 900 in an attempt to lessen the amount of audio captured and processed. Planning to lower antenna height from 15' to 10' this long weekend.
  • 2012march29 - change hourly strips to 30 minutes for better resolution on the web images
  • 2012march16 - network switch port dead/burnt out, moved to another port, all ok
  • 2012march15 - very close lightning storm strikes, lost network to observatory
  • 2012march10 - skypipe updated to v2.3.26
  • 2012March07 - no data uploaded for last 24 hours or so from 07:30 local due to changing IP addresses and too much security :)
  • 2012March05 - captured something large from 15:01 to 15:37 UT. Waiting for confirmation from other stations
  • 2012March03 - large windstorm strikes area for most of day. RJ mast/antennas survive without damage. Gusts recorded up to 61kph on our Weather Station.
  • 2012Mar02 - lowered skypipe .wav recorded threshold from 900 to 800 as we have not had a lot of recordings lately.
  • 2012Jan09 - added a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to power the data collecting netbook and broke the netbook power adapter! Later inside it tested out fine. Reinstalled and all is running well.
  • 2012Jan07 - all processing scripts up and running again. Should now be updating images hourly, processing any audio files hourly and adding to the 24 hour page hourly.
  • 2012Jan04 - installed new netbook computer as the data recorder for Radiojove. Still needs a lot of custom configuration to work correctly and input testing as well.
  • 2010Dec16 - data laptop hard drive dies, no replacement available.
  • 2011Dec15 - Radio Skypipe upgraded to v2.3.22
  • 2011Nov11 - Skypipe is now configured to record audio .WAV files whenever the signal goes above a threshold of 3000 and record for 10 seconds after it falls below that level. These .WAV files are huge, so now they are automatically converted to .MP3 at a sample rate of 192 kbps and the original .WAV are deleted. The MP3's are archived and uploaded to this website and are available here
  • 2011Oct14 - microsoft windows updates caused the laptop to restart thursday morning and skypipe does not normally autostart. Skypipe was also upgraded from 2.1.17 to 2.3.11 with no new features activated yet. Microsoft automatic updates turned off to prevent future problems.
  • 2011Sep16 - Operational again after moving data collection to a new laptop. Some tweaking of processes were ironed out this morning and everything should be working well.
  • 2011Sep11 - Since roughly a week back, since a great zinger of a lightning storm, the radio jove system has been out of service/broken/non-functional. It turns out the most likely culprit is the laptop audio port.
  • 2011Aug11 - with advice from the radio jove email list, we reduced the recording volumelevel of the microphone input of the laptop, giving the skypipe software a new base level of about 400 instead of its previous level of 7000. This is supposed to give us a better dynamic range for capturing events.
  • 2011Aug10 - fixing naming system from yy to yyyy as file prefix for complete year number. Added in daily archiving of last24.htm images for historical searching.
  • 2011Aug06 - created a web page displaying the last 24 hourly images to aid in looking up specific events in a one hour graph.
  • 2011Aug02 - Radio Jove is operational again. The power supply was a red herring as two different multimeters showed differing results from the power supply and the same ones from a new power supply. Then we found a disconnected audio feed from the receiver to the computer. All fixed! Using the original power supply and everything. Good thing to as the Sun is very active of late. Checking the Radio Telescope Supplies website, RadioJove kits are not available at this time as they are upgrading them real soon now.
  • 2011Jul31 - after removing the unit for testing, we have come across a power supply issue. Sometimes it shows 12vdc on a voltmeter, sometimes it shows 26vac. We tried another wall adapter 12vdc 1a and got a very loud hum from the system. Then we put a 12vdc 7ah battery on it and it seemed to be working again. So it is totally battery powered at the moment and we are looking for a new external power source without noise. The data still looks pretty flat.
  • 2011Jul22 - we had a two hour unscheduled power outage on the morning of July 20 and radiojove was offline during that time. Ever since then however it has been giving some strange results. We'll have to go and take a look at it with the audio speakers turned on as well.
  • 2011Jun19 - the allsky2 laptop running this radiojove project and the allsky camera had to be restarted after 66 days of continuous and error free operation... not too bad for an old circa2003 laptop running windows XP!
  • 20110429 - cut the feed RG-6 coax to 1.5 wavelengths and installed the receiver inside the observatory and powered everything up! It works! More time will be spent tweaking and testing the skypipe data logger, the receiver and antenna system, etc. System has gone LIVE
  • 20110416 - 4 hours to assemble the receiver and another two hours to put it into the enclosure and calibrate it.
  • 20110301 - installed the radio skypipe II software v2.1.7 on the allsky laptop in preparation for the radio jove electronics assembly.
  • 20100801 - assembled the southern dipole mast and antenna, attached the phase cable and the signal combiner.
  • 20100725 - assembled north dipole mast and antenna. We did not have enough PVC pipe to complete the 2nd dipole mast but did complete the southern dipole antenna.

    The dual dipole antennas set to 15' above ground aligned to geographic east/west.

    Our Antenna Setup

    ALl of the setup was derived from the instruction manuals. These three images/figures show the critical information needed:
    Our calculations (2010 July) led us to assemble the mast at a 15' level for the dipoles. The dipoles are aligned to true east-west (not magnetic).

    We plan to build the receiver assembly in the next week, find some RG6 coax to run from the combiner to the receiver and then finding some spare computer to take the audio output from the receiver and run it through a data recorder such as skypipe.

    We need approx 70' of coax to run from the antenna to the observatory building where the computer will be. Using RG6 coax (we could not find any RG59) we determined that the nearest 0.5 wavelength that is at least that long is 2.5 wavelengths of 38.18' (11.64m) or 95.45' (29.1m) in total. Luckily our local Rona hardware store sells a 30m roll of RG6 for only $40 or so.

    Jupiters declination in mid 2010 is approx 0 degrees and is increasing. It's elevation based on our latitude of approx 45 degrees will be approx 45 degrees and increasing.

    The antenna height above ground for 40-55 degrees is 15', so we assembled the mast for that height. 

    JEA=JupiterElevationAngle; AH=AntennaHeight
2010 Jul1 JEA=45deg AH=15'
2011 Jan1 JEA=43deg AH=15'
2011 Jul1 JEA=56deg AH=10'
2012 Jan1 JEA=55deg AH=15'
2012 Jul1 JEA=65deg AH=10'
2013 Jan1 JEA=65deg AH=10'

    Our receiver

    We assembled and tested the 20.1 MHz receiver over 6 hours on a rainy Saturday afternoon. There were over 100 components to solder in and now I can see why the price tag for an assembled receiver is so much more than the kit! Some of the harder parts of assembly were the identification of some of the smaller parts, with very tiny markings on them, like the picofarad capacitors, the inductors and some of the germanium diodes.

    Links

  • Radio Jove Homepage - http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/
  • radiojove-ant_manual.pdf 1mb
  • radiojove-rcvr_manual.pdf 3mb
  • radiojove-retrofit_antenna_manual.pdf (200kb)
  • radiojove-single_dipole_suppl_man_rev_1-1.pdf (1mb)
  • solder1.mpg (2mb)
  • solder2.mpg (2mb)
  • solder3.mpg (2mb)
  • solder4.mpg (2mb)
  • solder5.mpg (2mb)
  • solder6.mpg (2mb)

  • Radiosky Skypipe
  • http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/
  • http://herrero-radio-astronomy.blogspot.com/

    Code

    radiojove FTP's up imagery every hour to this server. This server has the following scripts/batch files:

    crontab 

    #runs hourly at 1 minute after the hour
1 * * * * /radiojove/moveimages
#runs hourly at 2 minutes after the hour
2 * * * * /radiojove/process
#runs once daily at 23:59 UT *needs to change when we move from EDT to EST
59 19 * * * /radiojove/archivedailyut
    moveimages script 
    #!/bin/bash
echo moving any images from radiojove to radiojove/archive/2011daily and 2011hourly
cd /radiojove/
for i in   *skypipepicFV.jpg
do
  mv $i archive/2011daily/$i
done
for i in   *skypipepic.jpg
do
  mv $i archive/2011hourly/$i
done
    process This script includes many redirections that do not display correctly within this html page.

    archivedailyut 

    #!/bin/bash
cd /radiojove/
LS=/bin/ls
echo at 23:59 UT copy last24.htm and rename to date and copy to archive
  datetimestamp=`$LS last24.htm -lgo --time-style=+%Y%m%d_%H%M_%S | cut -c 19-34`
  cp last24.htm "archive/scorj-$datetimestamp.htm"