GNURadio@theATA

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a 42-element radio telescope array located in Hat Creek, California, operated jointly by SETI Institute and UC Berkeley SETI Research Center. In an effort to increase accessibility to the array among potential users outside the astronomy community, we are working to integrate the array into GNU Radio software. We plan to start out by connecting USRPs to two ATA antennas and developing control, backend, and beamformer software.

GNU Radio / SETI Hackathon

In May 2019, the first step toward collaboration between the GNU Radio community, the ATA, SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen, and Berkeley SETI communities consisted of a hackathon hosted at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (home of the ATA). This culminated in, among other things, the development of a GNU Radio module called gr-ata.

Here's a link to material from the hackathon: https://github.com/SETIatHCRO/grhack/wiki And here's where you can find the ATA module: https://github.com/SETIatHCRO/gr-ata

First Steps

The first step in implementing GNU Radio with the ATA is ensuring that we can effectively play back previously-recorded SigMF files taken by the ATA in a GNU Radio flowgraph. We can do this using example code from the gr-ata module discussed above. To get those modules working, here's what you'll need (along with some installation tips discovered through trial-and-error):