CHART

The Completly Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope

https://astrochart.github.io

We created this project to make astronomy accessible to anyone that is interested and bring opportunities to learn about radio astronomy to a broad audience. You can find our full mission statement on our About page.

Our online tutorials will guide you step-by-step in creating your own radio telescope at home or in the classroom.

The tutorials are a work in progress, but so far will walk you through:

• Acquiring materials and equipment
• Setting up a Raspberry Pi to run GNU Radio
• Taking data with GNU Radio and a Software Define Radio (SDR)
• Building a feed horn to detect the 21cm signal from the Milky Way galaxy

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Software Installation

Here we provide the software installation instructions to get you started.

Analysis Only

If you are only using the analysis code, you can simply clone the repo and use pip to install.

git clone git@github.com:astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .

Full Install

CHART software uses GNU Radio, a free open source package for collecting and processing radio data. To learn more about GNU Radio visit this site https://www.gnuradio.org/about/.

We will assume you are running Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi (instructions here).

In a terminal, enter the following:

sudo apt install gnuradio-dev gr-osmosdr librtlsdr-dev build-essential git cmake
pip install ipython
pip install numpy

To use the GPS submodule (optional), run these lines:

sudo apt install gpsd gpsd-clients
pip install gps

Clone this repository and install.

git clone https://github.com/astrochart/CHART.git
cd CHART
pip install .

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