HUMBLE BUNDLE BONUS
One of the systems that
ALBATROS
Can you do long-term radio astronomy with a Raspberry Pi? Yes, and Taj Dyson
tells us how one is mapping out the universe and might find out how old it is
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Taj Dyson, and I’m an honours physics
undergrad at McGill. When I’m not doing
coursework, I’m either in Cynthia’s lab or working
on my own projects in my basement workshop
(…or playing Fire Emblem). This past summer,
I went with Cynthia Chiang to the McGill Arctic
Research Station (MARS) to take some radio
Taj
MAKER
astronomy measurements. We were joined also by
Dyson
Raul Monsalve of the EDGES team – more on them
An honours physics later. Our equipment is all made and designed
undergrad at McGill in our own lab, so knowledge of electronics and
University, high-
programming is key! We’re always upgrading
tech maker, and
programmer who our setup, year after year. Last year, I worked
also makes games. on the controller box for an autonomous solar-
mcgill.ca/mars powered antenna and data collection system.
Right now, though, I’m focusing more on the
data analysis side of things, writing Python
scripts to look through all our measurements
and determine how much of it is usable, and how
much was lost to radio frequency interference
(RFI). Determining how ‘clean’ (RFI-free) the
MARS site is for our antennas, and for other
magpi.cc ALBATROS
collects data from the
antenna – a Raspberry Pi
gets the data which is then
recorded on a hard drive
teams as well, was the real goal of this summer’s
expedition. When I’m not doing that, though, I
think about some personal projects, just for fun.
Right now that consists of making a high-voltage
(HV) voltage multiplier, to get the voltage from
an old microwave transformer up high enough
to lift a lifter (or ionocraft), because those things
are pretty cool. Past projects include a laser-
activated light switch and a life-size medi gun
(from Team Fortress 2) with lighting and motor
(but, alas, no healing properties). Those projects
were presented at the 2015 Bay Area Maker Faire
and 2015 New York Maker Faire. I’m also an avid
programmer, and have been doing so since I was
about nine, so when I’m not analysing data I
tend to use my programming to make games in
LÖVE2D or Python.
What is your experiment and what is the
significance of it?
An experiment like this takes time, though – to
clarify: this is not my personal experiment,
it is a collaborative effort between McGill,

The team are exploring powering the antenna
and data collection systems with solar power to
replace the generators currently used on Marion
A main antenna collects
the data from the radio
waves, feeding it to a
Raspberry Pi
the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the South
African National Space Agency, Carnegie Mellon
University, and the University of California
at Berkeley.
The purpose of setting up a low-frequency (0 to
125 MHz) radio antenna in remote locations like
MARS and Marion Island is twofold.
First, we want to make a map of the sky at low
frequencies, to lay the groundwork for future
observations of the cosmic ‘dark ages’ – the
time before stars formed. What does frequency
have to do with time? To understand, realise
that the universe was mostly neutral hydrogen.
This hydrogen naturally emits light , or ‘glows’,
at a wavelength of 21 cm (or about 1400 MHz
in frequency). We know this frequency very
precisely, and it’s emitted at the same frequency
for all time. Due to the expansion of the universe,
though, light from hydrogen that is further away is
redshifted; that is, its frequency is reduced (in the
Earth’s frame of reference). So, we can see light
from hydrogen that is further away by ‘tuning’
our antenna lower in frequency. Now, because
HUMBLE BUNDLE BONUS
These outposts are in the middle of
nowhere so that human-created radio
waves are few and far between
the speed of light is finite, we see hydrogen that
is younger as we look farther. So, really, we are
looking back into the universe’s past! The state-
of-the-art measurements at frequencies of a
few MHz are from Reber in the 1960s, back in
the pioneer days of radio astronomy when their
resolution was far worse than ours is now (and
Reber was measuring signals from the Milky Way
– we want to subtract that out to get at what’s
behind it!). So why isn’t there a new, more precise
measurement yet? The answer is human-generated
RFI. At frequencies that low, the ionosphere (a
layer of plasma in our upper atmosphere) bounces
short-wave radio from beyond the horizon
back at us very effectively. We need to look for
extremely remote corners of the world to get nice
measurements. Polar regions are especially nice
because of their better ionospheric conditions,
not to mention that the night there (when the
ionosphere is less active – it’s not being ionised
by the sun, only cosmic rays) lasts months at a
time. The sun is also flaring less than average right
now (we’re in a ‘solar minimum’), so this is an
ALBATROS magpi.cc
 HUMBLE BUNDLE BONUS
A full test kit to see
how the interference
was at specific points
in the local area
 e want to make a map of
W are exactly those of FM radio! So, our remote sites
the sky at low frequencies
opportune time for low frequency measurements
(it’ll be another eleven years until we’re at this
part of the solar cycle again). Solar flares are one
of the factors that ionise the ionosphere, mucking
up our measurements by reflecting RFI at us. In
fact, Reber only managed to get good data as low in
frequency as he did because he caught an especially
quiet solar minimum. Getting several maps of the
sky at several low frequencies would be the first
step towards understanding a whole era of the
universe that hasn’t been studied very extensively,
laying the groundwork for future measurements
that could provide insight into cosmological
mysteries like dark matter or dark energy.
Second, we want to make a measurement of
cosmic dawn: the time when the first stars in the
universe illuminated. There has already been a
measurement by the EDGES team, but their results
are not what anyone expected. If we corroborate
their result, it could suggest new physics or a new
understanding of cosmology. If we don’t, then
we’ll have to carefully review both experiments to
see what’s different, and what’s really going on.
The reason so few teams can work on this is again
magpi.cc ALBATROS
human-generated RFI: the frequencies under study
are perfect for this project.
How are you going about performing it?
Marion Island already has a few antennas set
up, taking sky measurements as we speak. The
data is saved on many-terabyte SSDs in the little
shipping container that the readout electronics
live in. One person each year stays the winter to
overlook operation and refuel the generators.
This is part of the reason we’re looking into
autonomous, solar-powered antennas. Then, each
year, Cynthia and a few others upgrade the setup
and take the winter’s data back to the University
of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa (nothing
beats the bandwidth of a hiker!). From there it’s
uploaded to their supercomputer cluster, so folks
like me on the other side of the planet can have a
look at it.
MARS is new to this project. The first time we
visited was last summer, and that was just to
have a look at how much RFI there is up there.
A first look at the data suggests that MARS is
very radio-quiet and will be an excellent place
for future observations! While no real scientific
measurements have been taken there, we will
return next summer to set up a few antennas,
and hopefully leave them running alone, wind-
powered (or maybe hydrogen fuel cells? We’re

not sure of the power solution up there…), over
the winter.
An important note about low-frequency radio
astronomy is that it’s incredibly low-budget
compared to the massive dishes required for
higher frequency. Lots of the parts we need to
make measurements are made in-lab. It’s very
much a part of maker culture, in my view at least.
Why the Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi has many desirable features
for our application. It can communicate directly
with our field-programmable gate array (FPGA),
which takes the analogue signal from the antenna,
then digitises it. Raspberry Pi can take that digital
signal and save it to a file on disk, thanks to a
Python script. The Gigabit Ethernet of Raspberry
Pi 3B+ is fast enough to keep up with our fastest
data-taking mode, where we dump the raw signal
from the FPGA straight on disk (without any
space-saving averaging). Since all of us at the lab
are huge geeks, we all run Linux, and that makes it
super-easy to talk to and run things on Raspberry
Pi using SSH. Raspberry Pi is small enough to fit
inside our readout electronics box easily. Raspberry
HUMBLE BUNDLE BONUS
The team spends
summers at MARS
(McGills Arctic
Research Station)
preparing the site
and retrieving data
Pi consumes a relatively small amount of power,
which is nice considering we want to make
autonomously powered stations. Not to mention
that Raspberry Pi is cheap enough that the lab has
a drawer marked ‘Raspberry Pi’ full of them.
Can you give me a basic list of hardware
you’re using?
• Long Wavelength Array (LWA) antenna
[use evident]
• A few 50-metre SMA cables [transmit analogue
signal from antenna to electronics]
• Metal box [for RFI shielding – don’t want the
device to contaminate itself with noise!]
• CASPER SNAP board [the FPGA discussed
earlier, to turn analogue to digital]
• Raspberry Pi [take digital signal from the FPGA
through its GPIO pins, save to file on the SSDs]
• A few many-terabyte SSDs [data storage]
• GPS-synced clock [when you have many
antennas, you want to make sure they all agree
on when a particular measurement happened. I
won’t get into interferometry right now]
• A few buck/boost converters [get all the right
voltages to the right parts]
ALBATROS magpi.cc
 HUMBLE BUNDLE BONUS
• Two huge (around 200 Ah) 12 V batteries [for
powering, large enough that we only need to
charge every couple days].
How long will the experiment take?
The short answer is, I have no idea.
We are funded to go to MARS for two more
years, but we hope this is just the beginning of
a much longer observing program. It’s going to
take a lot of R&D, antennas, and time to reach
our ultimate goal of mapping the universe during
cosmic dawn and the dark ages.
See Hofstadter’s law.
What kind of results do you expect to see?
First, I’ll talk about cosmic dawn. When
the first stars formed, their heat excited the
hydrogen around them, causing it to absorb the
cosmic microwave background (CMB) at a very
specific wavelength. Since this event happened
so long ago, the wavelength is now very long
Generators provide (again, due to redshift) and our low-frequency
power at the moment,
but the hope is to
equipment can pick it up. So, we expect to see
offload some of the a slight dip in signal at a certain frequency
power requirements
on solar (since we don’t know exactly how long ago
magpi.cc ALBATROS
this happened, we don’t know at exactly what
frequency). The EDGES result saw a dip that
was about twice as deep as predicted, which
means hydrogen absorbed more radiation
than expected. This could have all sorts of
cosmological implications. I’m not going to bet
on whether the EDGES result was real or not.
The mapping of the dark ages is not going to
test any theory: it’ll provide a baseline for future
low-frequency measurements. It doesn’t make
much sense to make a prediction.
Any other Raspberry Pi projects you’ve
made in a similar vein?
I’ve never done anything that takes full
advantage of all of the features of Raspberry Pi
like this before. I’ve programmed in Python on
them, but that was just using it as a computer,
and not taking advantage of the data collection
possible with the GPIO pins and Ethernet.
That just goes to show how much you can learn
on a project like this.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Study physics, travel the world!