This guide assumes basic knowledge of electronics, the Unix environment, and some experience with the Raspberry Pi platform itself.

A Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2832U DVB-T. The USB dongle is plugged into a Raspberry Pi 3/4 (1-2GB memory) running Raspbian Linux. To check that your USB dongle will work, see the section below regarding the 'rtl_test' command.

Recommended HB9-2 HB9CV 2 ELEMENT ANTENNA for the GRAVES frequency 143.05 MHz.

A Raspberry Pi 3B or 4, with one available USB port. Power supply. 8GB or larger SD Card. Recommend that the latest version of Raspbian is installed. At the time of writing, this is Raspbian Buster.

A wifi or wired ethernet connection to the internet is required to maintain the NTP time.

The software uses python3. The acquisition software reads the raw data from the USB radio and does a fast fourier transform (FFT) on each sample block as it is received. The FFT of each sample block is then analysed to check for a peak signal above the SNR threshold at a frequency +/- 120 Hz of the target frequency (GRAVES 143.05 MHz). After each detection trigger, the software stores the sample data for the next 10 seconds, converts the sample data to the frequency domain and stores the data. The detection data is stored in 2 files, the raw audio data in the form of a raw audio file, and the FFT data in the form of a numpy npz file.

Observation data is produced in the directories:

~/radar_data/       Detection FFT data files and audio files
    Logs/           Log files logging each detection in a variety of formats (see available formats below)
    Archive/        Directory for archiving detections of interest
    Captures/       Directory for keeping detections of interest
    Junk/           Directory for detections which are of no interest

Output filename format.

Audio file:     AUD_FFFFFFFFF_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_%%%%%%.raw
FFT file:       SPG_FFFFFFFFF_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_%%%%%%.npz

where:
FFFFFFFFF               is the centre frequency in Hz
YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_%%%%%%  is the date and time of the start of the observation to microsecond resolution

e.g.
AUD_143050000_20220206_132454_941629.raw
SPG_143050000_20220206_132454_941629.npz

Audio and FFT detection files are about 800 kB in size.

Raw observation data can be acquired instead using the -r option. This produces files containing the raw I/Q sample data from the SDR in the form of a numpy npz file with the name format:

SMP_FFFFFFFFF_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_%%%%%%.npz
e.g.
SMP_143050000_20220622_152435_196974.npz

These raw observation detection files are about 3.1 MB in size. They contain all of the information required for a detailed analysis of the meteor detection for example for high resolution head echo analysis.

The software tunes the USB software radio to a central frequency 2 kHz below the required frequency. This is so that a meteor detection yields an approximately 2 kHz audible tone on the upper sideband. The default frequency for radio meteor detection is the frequency of the GRAVES transmitter 143.05 MHz. The required frequency can be changed using the -f option.

The acquisition software uses about 60% of one CPU core of the Pi4, and about 90% of one core on a Pi3b. When a detection is made, a separate python MultiProcess is started to perform the FFT on the 10 seconds of stored sample data, and then store the data in the numpy npz format. This process uses 100% of a CPU core for about 10s. It is recommended that when running using a Pi3b, the --decimate option is used, as this significantly improves performance of the FFT routines for storing the detections.

Note. It may be necessary to experiment with the -s 'SNR' option to determine the optimum SNR detection threshold for the specific antenna/receiving equipment. The default SNR is set to 45 (~16dB). If there are too many false positives, then the SNR threshold should be increased.

The analyse_detection.py matplotlib tool can be used to visualise and analyse the resultant detection SPC or SMP npz files. This tool imports matplotlib and scipy.

The software uses the pyrtlsdr package for reading the USB data from the RTL SDR dongle. It also needs python-matplotlib and numpy for the FFT routines. The following external modules are required to run the software. These can be installed with the commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y rtl-sdr python-numpy python-setuptools python-pip libusb-dev python-matplotlib libatlas-base-dev
pip install pyrtlsdr scipy

To ensure that the RTL SDR dongle will work on your system, run the rtl_test program. Check that this detects your device and runs correctly.

rtl_test

The pandas package is needed to create the monthly detection counts graphs:

pip install pandas

Playing of audio and conversion of the raw data files to audio .wav files by the analysis software requires the sox package:

sudo apt install -y sox

The chrony package is recommended to be installed to maintain the NTP time synchronisation. This is optional, but use of chrony should ensure that timings of observations are accurate to within 1ms

sudo apt install -y chrony

Create a file named .radar_config in the top level home directory (e.g. ~/.radar_config) containing the following lines:

stationID: Mylocation ; Geographical location of the receiver
longitude: -1.999     ; Geographical longitude of the receiver
latitude: 50.999      ; Geographical latitude of the receiver
elevation: 24         ; Altitude above sea level of the receiver in metres
ID_NUM: 17            ; ID number used for Radio Meteor Detection Collaboration Project
foff: -60             ; Measured frequency offset of the receiver in Hz
TxSource: GRAVES      ; Name of the tranmitter
TimeSync: NTP         ; Time synchronisation method
country: UK           ; Country
region: Myregion      ; Region within country

Information about each meteor detection is logged to files in the ~/radar_data/Logs directory in the following formats.

Filename: RYYYYMMDD_Location.csv e.g. R20220127_Location.csv

Data format:

Ver,Y,M,D,h,m,s,Bri,Dur,freq,ID,Long,Lat,Alt,Tz
RMOB,2022,01,27,12,28,19.899,30.55,0.55,-40.77,Location,-1.99,50.99,24.0,0

Data provided in RMOB csv format to https://ukmeteornetwork.co.uk/

Filename: YYYY-MM.csv e.g. 2022-01.csv

Data format:

user_ID,date,time,signal,noise,frequency,durationc,durations,lat,long,source,timesync,snratio,doppler_estimate
17,2022-01-01,00:34:34.961687,-6.799,-31.262,2010,0,0.35,50.99,-1.99,GRAVES,NTP,24.46,10

Data provided for https://radiometeordetection.org/

A python script is provided to produce output data to allow use by the RMOB colorgramme software to produce an RMOB colorgramme for upload to RMOB.

python monthly_rmob.py -y 2022 -m 10 -o Observer

To get help using the acquisition software, run the command:

python meteor_radar.py -h

To start the acquisition software in verbose mode with a detection threshold SNR of 45, run the command:

python meteor_radar.py -v -s 45

To analyze the meteor detection FFT data in the .npz files in the output directory ~/radar_data :

python analyse_detection.py ~/radar_data

The raw sample audio files have a sample rate of 37.5k. They can be converted to .wav files using sox or played :

sox -r 37.5k -b 16 -e signed-integer -c 1 <audio_file.raw> <audio_file.wav>

# Play a raw audio file applying a 1500-3000 Hz bandpass filter
play -r 37.5k -b 16 -e signed-integer -c 1 <raw_audio_file> sinc 1500-3000

Below is an example of a meteor detection spectrogram as displayed by analyse_detection.py. In this example, the head echo can be clearly seen in the line moving across the plot from the right towards the centre. This line gives an indication of the radial velocity and deceleration of the meteor from the Doppler frequency shift. The later vertical component of the plot is the radio echo from the plasma trail. This echo from the plasma trail can also show Doppler frequency shifts.

To make the software run automatically on every boot, add the command to crontab using the command:

crontab -e

Then add the following line at the end of the crontab (e.g.) :

@reboot sleep 60 && python /home/pi/source/MeteorRadar/src/meteor_radar.py -s 45