SA028-0003
EclipseMob 2.0: Receiver Design for Low-Frequency RF Data Collection During the 2024 Solar Eclipse

Tuesday, 15 December 2020
Poster
KC Kerby-Patel, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, United States, Jill Nelson, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States, Laura Lukes, George Mason University Fairfax, Fairfax, VA, United States and William Liles, George Mason University (alumni), Fairfax, United States
Abstract:
The EclipseMob 1.0 citizen science experiment, which took place during the 2017 solar eclipse, was designed to collect low-frequency radio data from geographically diverse locations in order to study how the ionosphere changed during the eclipse. Participants were provided with a receiver kit and were asked to build their own receiver for the experiment. To support broad participation and facilitate data collection, the receiver interfaced with a smartphone for transmission of data to a central server.

Building the EclipseMob 1.0 receiver required participants to make appropriate connections for an instrumentation amplifier and two multipliers on a solderless breadboard. The build proved challenging for participants without experience in circuit building and testing, solderless connections were easy to disconnect or misalign accidentally, and it was difficult to evaluate whether the receiver was working as intended. In addition, the receiver circuit did not present an output impedance that was detected as an input by smartphones’ audio inputs, so most recordings failed.

In preparation for the 2024 solar eclipse, the EclipseMob team has developed version 2.0 of the low-frequency radio receiver. The updated receiver is capable of direct digital reception and has a simpler participant build process. Participants are asked to connect key components into IC sockets or USB connections, while voltage supply and gain-set connections are implemented on a PCB. The new design operates without a smartphone. Instead, it includes a microcontroller that performs A/D conversion and a Raspberry Pi that saves data to an SD card for later upload. The RF signal is sampled directly by the microcontroller, and some signal processing functions are performed on the chip before streaming data to the Raspberry Pi for storage.

In this session, we will give an overview of the goal and structure of the EclipseMob experiment and describe the design and functionality of the EclipseMob 2.0 receiver.

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