Dark Flow and a Soft Radio Network

To the dark matter and dark energy mysteries, we can now add dark flow...

NASA’s Sasha Kashlinsky discovered a twenty degree patch of sky between Centaurus and Vela to which 700 X-ray clusters are being pulled at 611 miles per second. The significance of this is that it contradicts predictions that large-scale motion should show no preferred direction and that the motions should decrease at ever increasing distances. Kashlinsky posits that the source of the pull is "outside the currently observable universe".

I mention this because this gives us a patch of sky to which we can point our software-defined radios and perhaps observe something interesting.

The limitation is that our radios have to either be space-borne or in the Southern Hemisphere to get in on the action. Also this "dark flow' patch occurs out of the range of the Ukrainian radio telescope data visualized in a previous post:

It is my hope to create a network of Orbs - Soft Radios that can cooperate to locate celestial signals. Orbs are wide-band radios that downlink to the web using TCP/IP 802.11 protocols. Orbs talk to each other to using ham, astronomy, and ISM bands in real time. Their locations in space time is computed using GPS-disciplined internal oscillators.

References

An Excerpt from Ham Radio Field Day 2009

Because of an exhausting 50 mile bike ride in the hot sun, I couldn't make it to Field Day on Saturday. I woke up late on Sunday, hoping to make some kind of belated appearance.

Just for fun, I started my HamTrack system at 9:47 am - a mashup of Google Earth, CW Skimmer, and C++ programs, glued together with some Unix tools, sed, grep, awk, along with the usual database fiddling and geolocating.

It is an end-to-end automated signal tracking system that translates RF morse code into pins on a map. So I left it running and headed over to the real Field Day, where, after catching up with my buds, I managed an impressive 2 contacts 15 minutes before the end of the event at 1 PM.

When I got home I discovered that 308 stations made 917 calls while I was gone, illustrated as pins in a map below. As in the 24 hour case, (previous blog), pins are colored by frequency, red for 6.9 MHz, blue for 7.1 MHz and spectral coloring in-between. My pin AE5CC is arbitrarily assigned red so I can find it in the sea of pins.

You will need the Google Earth browser plug-in to view the interactive map, and it takes a few seconds to load the data - about the time it takes to read this. If you don't use Google Earth, you're missing the best thing since sliced bread. - AE5CC

An Extreme Soft Radio Adventure - 24 Hrs @ 7 Mhz

After some antenna simulations using 4Nec2 (by Arie Voors) I wrapped a wire around my townhouse to create a loop HF antenna. I was curious if it was working and how the actual propagation pattern compared to my predictions. So I left my software defined radio, a Softrock 6.2 (by Tony Parks and Bill Tracey), running for 24 hours. It turned out to be quite an adventure!
Results: 1138 stations made 4907 calls, illustrated as pins in a map below. The pins are colored by frequency, red for 6.9 MHz, blue for 7.1 MHz and spectral coloring in-between.

Mouse over the map to see calls from the Island of Midway to Puerto Rico in longitude, from Alaska to Florida in latitude.

You will need the Google Earth browser plug-in to view the map, and it takes a few seconds to load the data - about the time it takes to read this. If you don't use Google Earth, there is an image at the bottom of the page. - AE5CC