Second Week

Completing the Receiver Box-

Most the parts that we ordered were in by the Tuesday of this week allowing for the final construction of the receiver to commence. Aside from some misaligned holes, construction of the final product went relatively smoothly. Self tapping screws were required to secure the lid on the box, since the use of nuts allowed for the screws to freely slip in the pre-drilled holes. Prior to testing the box, the computer with which the Viper telescope data is located encountered an error that did not allow for the system to boot up. The issue was found to be the fact Kernel had been corrupted on the system, and it had to be reinstalled. There is a program in the SRT folder on the computer that allows for the measurement of incoming frequencies and save them to a file to be observed later. Upon testing the box against the results of the USB device which served the same purpose, we found the box to be faulty so we looked to find what could be a source of error. We still got a signal through both, however, the box did not allow for the expected shift when radio waves are directed at the dish. We also wen through multiple cables to see if the fault lied in the transmission of the signal. Upon getting the voltage across the V+ and ground, we found that is was upwards of 36 Volts in AC and nearly zero in DC. We expected that value to be around 15 Volts. We didn't really have a way to see what was wrong in the box since it was sealed, and there weren't any clear indications as to what the cause of the issue was, so the conclusion was a faulty power box. Once the box was removed, some of the soldered connections on the board had to be redone. Dr. McColgan suggested that we find the difference in a transistor that has DC running through it, and that which has AC. In the protoboard we used, the function generator was broken, and we went through 3 different function generators to get a signal into the breadboard, however, we were unsuccessful in viewing a clear distinction.