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

[KC9SGV]

Great !
Will there be a Pase 4 Ground Station booth at Dayton ?
AMSAT-NA is displaying 4 launch-ready cubesats at their booth.
Hands-on cubesat building experience for STEM level students.
Cutout cardboard cubesats for kids.
Lots of hype towards LEO cubesats.

KC9SGV
Sent from my iPad

> On May 14, 2019, at 9:29 PM, Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:
> 
> 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
>