1. Extend open-source toolkit which can be used as an substitute for closed source programs.
2. Design and implement reliable algorithms for distinguishing different types of meteors.

RMDS01A is a SDR receiver system designed for radio detection of meteor trails. It's advantage over other designs is a high performance software defined receiver and completely open-source design, which allows for advanced signal processing of radio images. The primary setup we used included non open-source software like Spectrumlab and HDSDR. We therefore developed completely open-source alternative.

RMDS

Most important pieces of software are done. What is needed is to glue them together to cooperate flawlessly. For data acquisition we created program waterfall which reads input from SDR receiver and generates both FITS raw files and jpeg previews of these files for interactive visual inspection. For data synchronization with other nodes a set of bash scripts is used. Basic HTML5 interface was developed for live inspection of the received stream by many concurrent users over the internet.

Some screenshots from waterfall development:

1. Difficulty: medium Importance: high. GUI to glue all above mentioned software together to provide solid user experience and ease of use.
2. Difficulty: easy Importance: medium. Finish the HTML5 GUI for watching live streams, implement interactive elements (like LO frequency changing). Optimize for use with mobile devices (tablets, smartphones).
3. Difficulty: hard Importance: medium. Implement algorithms for trajectory calculation of meteors. We will provide all algorithms to be implemented. Some very basic example: http://meteor.uwo.ca/research/radar/cmor_intro.html
4. Difficulty: medium Importance: medium. Design and implement robust algorithms for processing the signal. The recommendations are to use one of: ROOT, GNU Octave, R.

Single package which will be able to install software needed for viewing, detection, collection and processing of meteor signals.

• Knowledge of programming languages necessary to implement the solution (C/C++ preferred for performance reasons).
• Ability to use/learn to use basic development tools (IDE, version control software, issue tracking systems).
• Ability to learn and use third-party libraries necessary to implement the solution (CFITSIO, libfft, libusb, …).
• Some math skills, at least has to know what Fourier transform does.
• Knowledge of most used data structures and algorithms, network and thread programming.

We have several Radio Meteor Detection Stations spreaded around central Europe (in range of French GRAVES radar). These stations are GPS time synchonised with precision of 65 ns. The relevant signal will be reflected from meteor trails created by meteoroids which have speed in range of 20 to 70 km/s. This signal will be loaded by various levels of noise on each of station. The sampled signal will be used to on-line determining meteor trail vector in terestrial coordinates - so the data bandwidth must by minimal required to this task. (This will be proceed in order to exrapolate impact elipse on the ground.)

How is optimal parameters of signal sampling ADC chained after SDRX01B receiver for obtain optimal precision of trail geometry? (eg. bit depth of conversion and sampling rate)

Expected result is least one of:

• Model of signal chain. (with noise injection)
• Mathematical explanation of optimal values.
• ADC parameters with explanation how was been determined.

For futher information we strongly recomends to cantact project coordinator Jakub Kakona (kaklik@mlab.cz)

Pokud navíc umíte český jazyk, tak je vhodné si též prohlédnout českou verzi stránky.