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 spread around the central Europe (within the range of French GRAVES radar). These stations are time synchonised by GPS with a precision of 65 ns. The relevant signals get reflected from meteor trails created by meteoroids which have a speed in the range of 20 to 70 km/s. These signals will be loaded by various levels of noise at each of the stations. The sampled signal will be used for on-line determination of the meteor trail vector in terrestrial coordinates - so the data bandwidth required by this task must be minimal. (This will processed in order to extrapolate impact ellipse on the ground.)

What are the optimal parameters of a signal sampling ADC chained after SDRX01B receiver for obtaining the best precision of the trail geometry? (eg. bit depth of conversion and sampling rate)

Expected result is at least one of the following:

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

For further information we strongly recommend to contact the project coordinator Jakub Kakona (kaklik@mlab.cz)

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