IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - February 2020 - 35

Seal and Urbina

Figure 8.
Illustration of network-enabled control of the system using a client-server architecture. This architecture is easily extendable,
meaning that multiple radar nodes (i.e. servers) could be introduced and controlled through a single client.

Figure 10.
Meteor Event T00037650 recorded at 04:30:03 Eastern Standard
Time. The event lasted approximately 7.550 seconds at a range of
106.65 km.

RESULTS
We deployed the system in mid-June, an optimal month for
meteor observations, a 13-h data collection was taken,
spanning the evening and early morning hours, when meteoric activity is at its peak. The system was configured using
a simple geometry in an effort to minimize environmental
variables and isolate receiver performance. Two Yagi
antennas, one for signal transmission and the other for
reception, were used to isolate transmit and receive paths,
with a relative spacing close enough to be considered
monostatic when considering the range of targets of interest. The RF front-end provided approximately 60-dB of
gain and a 9th-order elliptical bandpass filter, with characteristics that closely matched optimal theoretical calculations [4]. A 28-baud biphase coded signal was used with a
baud width of 5 ms providing 750-m range resolution. Over
the course of the collection, approximately 330 meteor echoes were recorded. Of these echoes, 2 events are illustrated
in Figures 9 and 10 as range versus time using an SNR color
map to enhance intensity. The number and distribution of
events match theoretical calculations assuming a 10-kW
peak transmit pulse, 10 dBi of gain for each antenna, and
typical loss terms set at 6 dB. In summary, all observations

were in agreement with theoretical calculations, validating
operation and performance of the receiver.

CONCLUSION
Software-defined radio technology has enabled the development of radio remote sensing instruments with modest
budgets. Processing capabilities once restricted to institutions with ample resources are now accessible to the larger
population who want to pursue Crowd Science. This new
era of budget-friendly hardware has, at an ever-increasing
rate, furthered the remote-sensing community as a whole.
The goal of this research is to supplement this effort by
providing a complete design [19], from antenna to disk,
with an emphasis on receiver requirements and signal
processing necessary for resource-limited hardware. This
work resulted in a stable, replicable receiver, assembled
for a few hundred dollars. System validation presented in
this article resulted in several hours of high-fidelity, meteoric events, proving that the system is both operational
and stable over long periods.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by NSF grants ATM-0638624
and ATM-0457156 to The Pennsylvania State University.

REFERENCES
[1] Wikipedia, "Universal software radio peripheral (USRP),"
2014. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Universal_Software_Radio_Peripheral

Figure 9.
Meteor Event T00032898 recorded at 03:10:52 Eastern Standard
Time. The event lasted approximately 6.740 seconds at a range of
112.50 km.

FEBRUARY 2020

[2] P. Hintjens and M. Sustrik, "ZeroMQ-The intelligent

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

transport layer," 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.
zeromq.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Software_Radio_Peripheral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Software_Radio_Peripheral http://www.zeromq.org http://www.zeromq.org

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