Gathering Eclipse Data Via Ham Radio

November 30, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

A solar eclipse is coming up in just a few weeks, and although with its path of totality near the southern tip of South America means that not many people will be able to see it first-hand, there is an opportunity to get involved with it even at an extreme distance. PhD candidate [Kristina] and the organization HamSCI are trying to learn a little bit more about the effects of an eclipse on radio communications, and all that is required to help is a receiver capable of listening in the 10 MHz range during the time of the eclipse.

It’s well-known that certain radio waves can propagate further depending on the time of day due to changes in many factors such as the state of the ionosphere and the amount of solar activity. What is not known is specifically how the paths can vary over the course of the day. During the eclipse the sun’s interference is minimized, and its impact can be more directly measured in a more controlled experiment. By tuning into particular time stations and recording data during the eclipse, it’s possible to see how exactly the eclipse impacts propagation of these signals. [Kristina] hopes to take all of the data gathered during the event to observe the doppler effect that is expected to occur.

The project requires a large amount of volunteers to listen in to the time stations during the eclipse (even if it is not visible to them) and there are only a few more days before this eclipse happens. If you have the required hardware, which is essentially just a receiver capable of receiving upper-sideband signals in 10 MHz range, it may be worthwhile to give this a shot. If not, there may be some time to cobble together an SDR that can listen in (even an RTL-SDR set up for 10 MHz will work) provided you can use it to record the required samples. It’s definitely a time that ham radio could embrace the hacker community.

Doppler Gesture Sensing In JavaScript

March 13, 2015 by Ethan Zonca 19 Comments

[Daniel] stumbled on an interesting paper (which we featured before) on Doppler gesture sensing using only a computer’s speaker and microphone. Unfortunately the paper didn’t include source code so [Daniel] created his own implementation of Doppler gesture sensing in JavaScript that works right in the browser.

[Daniel]’s JavaScript library generates a sine wave at 20 kHz that’s played through the computer’s speakers. The frequency is high enough that it’s pretty much inaudible. While the tone is being played through the speakers, the computer’s microphone is used to sample the audio and calculate the frequency spectrum of the signal. As you move your hand closer to the computer while the tone is playing, the frequency of the received signal shifts higher; as you move your hand away, it shifts lower. [Daniel]’s script looks for this frequency shift and uses it to trigger events.

[Daniel] has some awesome examples included on his website where you can test out the functionality for yourself. He has a hands-free scrolling example, spectrum plot, and even a virtual theremin. Since his code is bundled up into an easy-to-use library, it should be fairly easy to integrate into any webpage. The only real limitation to the library is that it only works in Chrome right now (Firefox doesn’t support disabling echo cancellation).

Those USB TV Tuners Used For SDR Can Also Grab GPS Data

April 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

Talk about versatile hardware. These inexpensive TV tuner dongles can also grab GPS data. You may remember seeing this same hardware used as a $20 option for software defined radio. But [Michele Bavaro] decided to see what other tricks they could pull off.

Would it surprise you that he can get location data accurate to about 20 centimeters? That figure doesn’t tell the whole story, as readings were taken while the dongle was stationary for three hours, then averaged to achieve that type of accuracy. But depending on what you need the data for this might not be a problem. And [Michele] does plan to implement real-time GPS data in his next iteration of the project. He plans to use an SDR acquisition algorithm to measure doppler shift in accounting for the slow clock speed of the dongles compared to standard GPS receivers. We can understand how that would work, but we’re glad he has the skills to actually make it happen because we’re at a loss on how the concept could be implemented.

[via Reddit]

Doppler-effect Lets You Add Gestures To Your Computer

March 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

What if you could add gesture recognition to your computer without making any hardware changes? This research project seeks to use computer microphone and speakers to recognize hand gestures. Audio is played over the speakers, with the input from the microphone processed to detect Doppler shift. In this way it can detect your hand movements (or movement of any object that reflects sound).

The sound output is in a range of 22-80 kHz which is not audible to our ears. It does make us wonder if widespread use of this will drive the pet population crazy, or reroute migration paths of wildlife, but that’s research for another day. The system can even be used while audible sounds are also being played, so you don’t lose the ability to listen to music or watch video.

The screen above shows the raw output of the application. But in the video after the break you can see some possible uses. It works for scrolling pages, double-clicking (or double-tapping as it were), and there’s a function that detects the user walking away from the computer and locks the screen automatically.

[Sidhant Gupta] is the researcher who put the video together. In addition to this project (called SoundWave) he’s got several other interesting alternative-input projects on his research page. Continue reading “Doppler-effect Lets You Add Gestures To Your Computer” →