Initial Activities

The first tasks were to build up the 21 cm receiver chain and do a 'first light' drift-scan with the antenna pointing such that it crosses the galactic equator in the direction near to the galactic centre.

The data acquisition software used for the first light run (CFRAD2.exe) was provided by Michiel Klaassen.   This console application requires pre-configuration of the dongle via the SDR# application.  While running it collects IQ data from the dongle and every 5 minutes performs a complex FFT and then writes the result out to a text file.

The result from near to the Galactic centre was encouraging...

...where the green line is the CFRAD2.exe result and the blue line is the result from the Leiden/Argentine/Bonn (LAB) survey website.  The similarity is convincing proof that the system is working at least for 'local' (within our Galaxy) hydrogen line signals.