DSES Technical and Operations Meeting Minutes- October 8, 2018

DSES Technical and Operations Meeting Minutes- October 8, 2018 by Bill Miller, DSES Vice President and Acting Secretary.

[Please click to read the PDF file.]

News & Announcement Board

Upcoming Activities

We are planning to operate Moon Bounce (EME) with our 60 foot antenna for the upcoming ARRL EME Contest on the weekend of October 10-11, 2020 (GMT). We at minimum will be at the Plishner site from late Friday Oct, 9 through mid Saturday. to operate while the Moon is above the horizon. This is the first time we are participating in such a contest. We will operate at 1296 MHz, on CW (Morse Code) and SSB (voice), and possibly on digital modes also. A work team will be at the site on Saturday morning Oct. 3 to complete installation of equipment and testing. Please contact us if you would like more information at information(at)dses.science..

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At this time we are holding our monthly meetings as virtual meetings. Our engineering meetings are normally held on the second Monday of each month. Our science meetings are held on the fourth Monday of each month. Start time is 5:30 PM. Email notifications are sent to members prior to the meetings. If you would like information to participate, please contact us at information(at)dses.science.

Work trips to the Haswell antenna site are generally scheduled for each third Saturday of the month, with weather alternates on Sunday. This third weekend was chosen because it comes between our engineering and science meetings. Having a regular date helps our members plan ahead, especially those who must travel long distances. During the Covid-19 pandemic, work and science trips may be coordinated for other times. NOTE: Please coordinate with us before you go to the Plishner site, information(at)dses.science.

News

Bob Haggart and Rich Russel did an all-nighter observation run Friday/Saturday, September 19, 2020. They observed 2 more pulsars: VELA (B0833-45) and B1946+35. The VELA pulsar is one of the strongest pulsars at 5 JY, but also difficult to observe in the northern hemisphere because it only appears low in the sky. We may be one of the northernmost amateur stations to observe it. Meanwhile B1946+35 is at 0.145 JY. We have now observed 13 pulsars, which places us 5th among amateur observers in the world. See the link for more information. Congratulations to Bob and Rich, also continuing thanks to all the members that have been supporting the efforts.

A DSES observing team were at the Plishner radio telescope site on Saturday September 12, 2020. The team successfully observed 3 new pulsars that we had not observed before: B1508+55, B1749-28, and B1933+16. We tried but did not detect 4 other pulsars. Members of the team were Rich Russel, Bob Haggart, Bill Miller, and Gary Agranat. 11 Pulsars Observed so far, as of 9-12-2020.

DSES Pulsar Observing Team netted 5 pulsars! The observing team of Rich Russel, Ray Uberecken and Glenn Davis observed 5 pulsars we had not detected before. The observations were done on Saturday September 5, 2020 with the 60-foot dish antenna at Haswell. After realigning the azimuth calibration, all observation runs were successfully. See the post and slides . Details to come at the next science meeting.

We posted the video and slide set from our DSES Science Meeting of August 24, 2020. The meeting was hosted by Rich Russel.

We are now posting on the Home Page our Planning Schedule for Observations and usage of the 60-foot antenna at the Plishner site in Haswell. Please coordinate usage at our engineering and science meetings, or contact the Science or Engineering Leads.

The Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers 2020 Annual Eastern Conference now has its presentation talks available online. [August 17, 2020]

The Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers 2020 Annual Conference was held online on August 1-2, 2020, and by all accounts it went well. Nominally the conference is held each year at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. This year the conference was carried completely online using Zoom. And this year the coordinator for the conference was our own DSES Science Lead, Richard Russel. Over 93 SARA members participated, including several DSES members. DSES members Ray Uberecken, Skip Crilly, and Rich Russel gave talk presentations. Rich was also elected as Vice President of SARA. [August 8, 2020]

We are sad to report that DSES Member Mel Graves, WR0I from Sedgwick, KS north of Wichita became a silent key on August 6, 2020. Mel was a voting member of DSES for over 7 years and was very excited at what our 60 foot dish would offer to ham radio and the radio astronomy community. I first met Mel at the 2016 Microwave Update Conference in St Louis in 2016 and again in 2017 at the Central States VHF Conference in Albuquerque. Mel was very active on VHF, UHF, and Microwave across the Midwest and was recently accumulating 47GHz and 122 GHz equipment. Funeral arrangements are currently pending. [August 8, 2020]
- Myron Babcock, DSES Treasurer

Website Update Notes

Active Experiments

Current experiments now in progress at the Plishner Radio Astronomy & Space Science Center site in Haswell:

60-foot dish antenna:

Current main work with the 60-foot antenna is to develop our ability to detect pulsars. This includes being able to track (at this time manually tracking) on specific celestial coordinates. We succeeded in observing our first pulsar on May 2, 2020.

We are regularly using the 60 foot dish antenna for joint observing runs for SETI with Skip Crilly at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. These joint observations are discussed in several of Skip's presentation slides. Please see our presentations page.

Jupiter Radio Science Experiment "Radio Jove":
20.1 MHz monitoring of Jupiter and its moon Io, using a 2-element phased dipole antenna - currently down, pending repair of the receiver.

Experiments in Colorado Springs:

Drift scan survey of Milky Way of HI 1420 MHz spectral line.

Development of hardware/software and techniques for detecting pulsars.

Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance Monitor (SID):
- 25 kHz VLF Solar flare monitoring

More information about our currently running experiments