Mario Cannistrà
Published © CC BY

Radio-Astronomy with RTL-SDR, RPi and Amazon AWS IoT

Radio emissions from sky sources like Sun and Jupiter can be received and converted to digital domain for processing.

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Radio-Astronomy with RTL-SDR, RPi and Amazon AWS IoT

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
×1
rtl-sdr cheap radio receiver dongle
( tuner based on R820T chip, any brand )
×1
HF up-converter
any HF up-converter made for 0 to 50 MHz should be ok - I've used this one but is already sold out: http://upconverterup-100.blogspot.it/
×1
antenna wire, insulators, poles, connectors per the radio jove antenna manual (page 22 of pdf)
×1
SMA male connector
×3
SMA female to MCX male adapter
optional (depends on connector type on the rtl-sdr dongle you purchased, see text)
×1
aluminum cases by Hammond
found them on eBay, also Mouser.com has them
×1

Software apps and online services

AWS IoT
Amazon Web Services AWS IoT
AWS S3
Amazon Web Services AWS S3
AWS IAM
Amazon Web Services AWS IAM

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Soldering iron (generic)
Soldering iron (generic)
5V filtered power source
you should avoid using a phone charger or similar switching power sources since they can produce RF interference depending on their quality
drill
for making holes in metal cases for connectors

Story

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Schematics

overall connection diagram

use this to connect all the devices

5 V power supply

adding the diagram of my old power supply

Code

radio astronomy python programs for Raspberry PI 2 and 3

use these to run radio scans with rtl-sdr dongles on frequencies 24 - 1750 MHz and share spectrograms via AWS cloud

Credits

Mario Cannistrà

Mario Cannistrà

3 projects • 63 followers
Working on IoT, sensor fusion and Kalman filters since May 2014; Amateur (radio)astronomer; member of ACM; previously IEEE, ComputerSociety

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