Interferometer data collection Part 1: Observation data collection

Post date: Nov 30, 2011 4:32:11 PM

This section describes the details for recording data from three BladeRF SDRs from three antennas.

1. the bladeRF-cli command is used to start each radio and set its MIMO state.

bladeRF-cli -d "libusb: instance=0" -i

mimo master

close

bladeRF-cli -d "libusb: instance=1" -i

mimo slave

close

bladeRF-cli -d "libusb: instance=2" -i

mimo slave

close

2. Gnuradio is started - "gnuradio-companion"

3. A flowgraph is executed to record data to files on three separate 1 Tb SSDs (see attached .grc flowgraph and screenshot). Important details for SDR communication buffering are included in the .grc flowgraph to prevent dropping samples).

The recording process is done now and raw IQ data from each radio is ready for cross correlation. Each file is big, and right now, I lack the ability to do on-the-fly cross correlation, so post-processing is being done for now. Still, these files could contain important information that would be lost. For instance, pulsars and fast radio transients might be identifiable in these whole data files.