Finally, we're getting somewhere.

So, i finally met the professor whom i've been stalking for almost 3 weeks now! I kept mailing the prof and swinging by his room, hoping that he'd be there. And last wednesday, i finally met him, Prof. HSR, a professor in the Elec Dept at IIT Madras. He's known to be a pundit on antenna design and simulations. When i started working on the radio astronomy project, as senior had asked me to contact him regarding any doubts and more fundamentally, the direction in which my project would head. 

 well, now that i've finally met him, i did get quite a few doubts cleared and know what i'm supposed to be doing in the coming months! 

 Apparently, as i suspected, the response function of the antenna or the gain from the antenna is frequency dependent and trying to deconvolute the signal (in the frequency spectrum) from the antenna without the proper response function is moot! 

 Also, in addition to the response function, the effective aperture of the antenna is also frequency dependent and we have to take this into effect as well when we're temporally deconvoluting the signal. 

 Simulating the radiation pattern will help us understand the effective aperture of the antenna and we need to similarly simulate the response function of the antenna as well. 

 These parameters will be different for different antenna designs like yagi-uda, half-wave dipoles etc. So, the next step of my project will be to try and decide on the best antenna architecture for my antenna so that i have good gain through my observation band. 

 And this is where we have one more twist. 

 There are certain antenna structures which will give us a frequency dependent response function i.e the gain from the antenna will be the same over a huuuge band, of the order of ~200MHz. They are rather hard to construct but once we take care of that, we have one less problem to worry about when we're dealing with the data. 

 Anyway, for now he has asked me to understand finite element method and it's use in simulating the radiation pattern of an antenna. i will have to understand the response function as well. 

 Along side, i am looking for a good low noise amplifier and i'm trying to compare my method of retrieving data from the antenna to the method mentioned in the radio jove manual. 

 It seems to be quite a bit of work. 
And believe me it is... 

 Let's see how of it i get done this semester...  

Popular posts from this blog

Animation using GNUPlot

Image
Animation using GNUPlot I've been trying to create an animation depicting a quasar spectrum moving across the 5 SDSS pass bands with respect to redshift. It is important to visualise what emission lines are moving in and out of bands to be able to understand the color-redshift plots and the changes in it. I've tried doing this using the animate function in matplotlib, python but i wasn't able to make it work - meaning i worked on it for a couple of days and then i gave up, not having found solutions for my problems on the internet. And then i came across this site, where the gunn-peterson trough and the lyman alpha forest have been depicted - in a beautiful manner. And this got me interested in using js and d3 to do the animations and make it dynamic - using sliders etc. In the meanwhile, i thought i'd look up and see if there was a way to create animations in gnuplot and whoopdedoo, what do i find but nirvana! In the image, you see 5 static curv
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Thoughts on the National Deep Tech Startup Policy

The Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India published a draft policy to support and nurtue the unique requirements of Deep Tech startups in India. I just finished reading it and put together a few comments in a FOSS United forum thread . I will probably read it again a week or so later and try to update my comments on the thread with any new insights/thoughts I have.
Read more