Peter East OBE FREng
Peter East is retired from a Defence Electronics career in radar and electronic warfare system design. A member of the BAA since 1975, he has a book published on ‘Microwave System Design Tools’. He has had a lifelong interest in radio astronomy; presently active in amateur detection of pulsars using SDRs and has recently compiled an ebook on this work, ‘Galactic Hydrogen and Pulsars – an Amateurs Radio Astronomy’. He maintains an active Radio Astronomy website at http://www.y1pwe.co.uk
How to Catch a Pulsar
The strongest pulsar in the northern hemisphere is B0329+54. The main pulsar characteristics are very accurate pulse timing and broadband noise transmission; the energy scintillates and is dispersed in frequency. Pulsars are one of the weakest radio sources but their published characteristics are freely available to aid amateur search. Pulse period-matched integration is the most effective technique to recover a pulsar from galactic and receiver noise plus possibly some minor local interference. There is good availability of hardware to construct a backyard radio telescope and free software to collect and process the data. There is still scope for amateurs to further process the data to better confirm detection; a technique investigated here, exploits the random scintillation property to improve signal confidence.