[Ground-station] Day 1 at Allen Telescope Array - Breakthrough Listen

[Michelle Thompson]

Quick report from the GNU Radio SETI Institute hackfest here at Allen
Telescope Array. This is a radio telescope in Northern California that is
very interested in improving integration with GNU Radio and machine
learning. There are about 30 members on the hackfest team. Participants
come from a wide variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise. Everyone is
accomplished, friendly, and more than willing to dive right in to a very
open-ended and daunting task. We will work here all week. Many of the
participants get to stay at the dorms and residences on site at the
observatory. Not all of us could fit on site, so a few of us are in hotels
in the nearest town (Burney, CA).

Several of the participants were part of the Block Party at GRCon18 or had
met us at DEFCON. I gave a brief update about the progress we've made and
the lessons learned just since September.

The day began with orientation, tours of the control room and the
telescopes, a history of SETI, and a summary of the Breakthrough series of
projects. We are here to support Breakthrough Listen. The control room has
several generations of very impressive digital data-handling circuits.

Today's work focused on machine learning for the 42 telescopes in the
array, writing source blocks that can run the array, improving the SigMF
metadata format that is used here at the array, tutorials for GNU Radio,
practice using datasets from ATA, and several other areas. This is a
significant amount of progress in just the first day.

People that brought SDRs can attach them to a telescope and collect live
data. Several historical datasets have been made available, including
Voyager and Rosetta. Data collected during the hackfest will be made
available. We are planning to publish it through the new IEEE dataset
service. All of the work done here will be published and open source.

Questions for the team or staff? Send them and I'll ask!

Amateur radio is highly valued here. There are a lot of amateur radio
operators on the team and on the staff at the observatory. Collaboration
with the technical amateur and open source community is a priority for
SETI. This is a very exciting and heartening thing to witness. It's a
privilege to be a small part of it, support it, and contribute towards the
goals.

While this isn't a Phase 4 specific event or effort, there are several
aspects of the work that will help us. Anything that improves GNU Radio or
promotes technical amateur radio is a win, and both of those things appear
to be well on their way to happening this week.

-Michelle W5NYV
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