[time-nuts] Pulsars

Paul Nicholson vlf0308 at abelian.org
Tue Oct 5 07:43:55 UTC 2010


Hal Murray wrote:

 > What sort of gear does it take to hear a pulsar?
 > ... Is there a convenient one up near the north pole?

A potential target is PSR0329+54,  1.5 Jansky at 400Mhz,
which corresponds to about 1.5E-26 W/m^2/Hz.

I did some rough calculations and concluded that with
a 16dB gain beam, a 120 hour epoch-folding integration
might be enough for it to show up on a 'periodgram'.

This was with 150kHz bandwidth, 40K front-end temperature.

I tried this about 10 years ago, with no success but I didn't
have very good antenna steering - I used a bank of four phased
high-gain UHF TV antennas, polar mount clamped at +54 declination.
It was necessary to write software to continuously re-time the
received signal to barycentric coordinates before the integration.
I injected a 1PPS from MSF 60kHz as the timing reference.

A fun project, one that I will return to one day.
--
Paul Nicholson
--






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