Another 10 mW WSPR Beacon

I enjoy writing up my projects, but it’s much better to get feedback to see that someone was actually able to take my writing and successfully duplicate my project. Via the Etherkit Twitter account, I received this from Tom Hall, AK2B regarding my last posted project:

@etherkit 10mw WSPR station last 12 hours. Very simple and very effective antenna and propagation test.Thanks @nt7s pic.twitter.com/EGzOuJuWCJ

— Tom Hall (@Tom_AK2B) April 24, 2016

Awesome work! Tom has been a great supporter of Etherkit from the beginning and I’d like to thank him for sharing his neat creations with the rest of us. It’s wonderful to see such a minimalist design perform so well!

More Coding Resources for Fun

I haven’t had a ton of free time here, but I do get snippets of time occasionally where I can sit with my notebook PC for a bit and mess around. As mentioned in some recent posts, I’ve been revisiting coding for fun, and I’ve stumbled upon quite a bit of new resources that are new to me and that I thought would be good to share.

The first one I’d like to mention is called Scratchapixel. I was curious about the mathematical methods behind 3D rendering, and some searching brought me to this exhaustive tutorial site. It’s not 100% complete yet, but most of the fundamentals of 3D graphics are already well-explained there. A fantastic resource if you are curious about the first principles of 3D rendering like me.

A related site is called Shadertoy. Not by the same people, but also related to the topic of learning 3D programming. Shadertoy is a web application that lets you play with shaders in C++ inside a web IDE that can be updated on-the-fly. It takes a bit of CPU and graphics horsepower to run comfortably, but if you’ve got the capacity, it’s worth browsing the demos on the site just to see the cool stuff you can create with it. This tool was created by Íñigo Quílez, who also has a really cool home page with lots of tutorials and whitepapers. If you like demoscene stuff, then definitely check it out.

Another neat find that I only recently discovered goes by the name of Rosetta Code. It bills itself as a programming chrestomathy site, which basically means that it’s a way to learn how programming languages are related in a comparative way. There is a large directory of different programming tasks, and each task page lists ways to implement a solution in a wide variety of languages. It’s a wiki, so not every page has every language implementation, but there’s obviously a ton of work put into the site, and most tasks have implementation in the major languages. Really fascinating and useful at the same time.

Finally, there’s The Nature of Code. This site hosts a free e-book download of the content, and provides a link to purchase a dead tree version if you wish. Here’s how the website describes the book:

How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This book focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using Processing.

That sounds right up my alley. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have skimmed it a bit, and it looks like the kind of things that I love: non-linear systems, physics simulations, fractals, and the like. When things settle down here a bit, I may tackle the book and re-write the sample code into Python. That would give me some more Python practice and force me to really think about the algorithms behind the text, not just blindly copying, pasting, and executing the scripts.

Let me know in the comments if you found any of these links useful or fascinating, or better yet if you know of other links in the same vein.

New Miles-Per-Watt Record Opportunity?

If you regularly follow science news, you may have heard of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative. In short, this is a study to create pathfinding technology that would allow the eventual launch of micro-lightsails with tiny mass to the Alpha Centauri system at a significant velocity (0.2c!) with a ground-based laser array. It’s probably a serious effort, as it is being privately funded to the tune of a whopping $100,000,000. No doubt, an extremely audacious undertaking.

Sounds interesting, but what does this have to do with radio? Well, obviously there’s the issue of how you can get a usable signal back to Earth across a distance of 4-and-a-half lightyears from a craft that masses in 10s of grams. I was wondering about that exact engineering challenge when I came across this article in my feed reader today. It turns out that someone has studied how one might use the Sun as a gravitational lens for lightwave communication across interstellar distances. Claudio Maccone, an Italian physicist, has run an analysis and has determined that putting a receiver at distance of at least 550 AU from Sol will give the desired lensing effect for optical communications.

Speaking before Maccone at the Breakthrough Discuss meeting, Slava Turyshev (Caltech) pointed out that the gain for optical radiation through a FOCAL mission is 10¹¹, a gain that oscillates but increases as you go further from the lens. This gives us the opportunity to consider multi-pixel imaging of exoplanets before we ever send missions to them.

That’s kind of amazing. Maccone calculates that the bit error rate of optical communication from at any significant distance from Sol quickly degrades to around 0.5. However, by using the Sun as a lens, the BER stays at 0 out to a distance of 9 LY. Here is a graph of the effect of standard comms and those enhanced by using the Sun as a gravitational lens, as calculated by Maccone:

What’s really crazy is this next paragraph:

But as Maccone told the crowd at Stanford, we do much better still if we set up a bridge with not one but two FOCAL missions. Put one at the gravitational lens of the Sun, the other at the lens of the other star. At this point, things get wild. The minimum transmitted power drops to less than 10^-4 watts. You’re reading that right — one-tenth of a milliwatt is enough to create error-free communications between the Sun and Alpha Centauri through two FOCAL antennas. Maccone’s paper assumes two 12-meter FOCAL antennas. StarShot envisions using its somewhat smaller sail as the antenna, a goal given impetus by these numbers.

So that would have to rate as the ultimate QRP DX, eh? I’m not sure how realistic any of this is, but I’m pretty sure the physics are well-established by now. Kind of makes the Elser-Mathes Cup look like small potatoes.