I can't recall what I said before, but it *has* been done in the backyard before. There's good news and bad news. The good news is that all the software for processing your data: coherent dedispersion, folding, moving all arrival times to the solar system barycentre, Einstein delay, Shapiro delay, fitting, analysis etc is open source. You need DSPSR, PSRCHIVE, and TEMPO2 and a unix machine to run them on.
The bad news: Vela had a declination of -45 10 35 which means it's not visible very often for you northerners. The second brightest pulsar has a similar declination. After that, forget it - they are too faint. Observing of individual pulses requires around a 20+ m radio telescope with a receiver cooled to 20K (at ~1400 MHz). However using the above software you can fold your data on the latest pulse period (which I can provide if needed) and this then brings things down to a possible level: You'll need a dish that can track. One that is 2 m across might just work. Frequency choice is important. The lower the frequency the stronger the pulse, but also multipath scattering smears the pulse out. Around 1400 MHz is a good choice for removing the scattering, but may be too faint for small dishes. If you went with ~600 MHz that could work - but do check any local RFI. If you didn't track, but just waited for the pulsar to pass through the beam, you'd get about 2 minutes of data. That *might* be enough to fold and get a signal. It'd be a long, but awesome, project to work on. The really cool part is that Vela glitches (speeds up) in rotation ~3 years by around deltaf/f =10^-6 and you could measure that. It just glitched in December (and I was observing at the time!), so you have another 3 years to get building. As to timing, any half decent GPSDO would be fine. Oh, almost forgot, you'd also need a sampler. Jim Palfreyman On 26 January 2017 at 13:58, Tom Van Baak <t...@leapsecond.com> wrote: > > What can I do at home, to observe such processes? Or is it way beyond > > any imagination to participate in any such experiments? > > > > Volker > > LIGO is a billion dollar experiment, involving thousands of PhD's so it > will be some time until you can do that sort of stuff alone at home, or > with your family. > > Jim Palfreyman has mentioned before what it would take to do Pulsar > measurements as a home experiment. Search for the old threads or he can > jump in to remind us why it can't or hasn't been done yet. See also the > thread a month ago about a DIY H-masers since you'll want some of them on > hand before you start. > > It's worth spending time reading anything about LIGO. The experiment is > out-of-this-world clever, complex, sensitive. And it actually works! Unlike > the particle physics tree, which seems to be nearing the end of bearing > fruit, LIGO is at the very beginning of an entirely new way to study the > universe. > > /tvb > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/ > mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.