SAASST News

Saturday, 11 December 2021 15:04

New SAASST Project: Sharjah Solar Radio Spectrometer

The Radio Astronomy Lab team at SAASST developed a new system to study solar radio bursts in the frequency range from the upper HF band to the lower VHF band (25 MHz – 55 MHz). Like all radio telescopes, the Sharjah Solar Radio Spectrometer (SSRS) consists of three elements: antenna, receiver, and monitoring software. The antenna is a copper wire formed as an inverted V folded dipole hanging at 2 meters to cover the frequencies as mentioned

earlier. For the receiver, SSRS uses an RTL_SDR dongle, and the software used is the Jove Radio Spectrograph that allows users to see the radio signals distributed across the 30 MHz bandwidth. This solar radio spectrometer allows the researchers to identify different radio solar bursts associated with solar flares during high solar activity.

Mr. Mohamed Rihan, SAASST research assistant at the Radio Astronomy Laboratory built the SSRS along with Mr. Essam Abu-Jami (SAASST IT Director), Mr. Yusuf Faroukh (Research Engineer, CubeSat Laboratory), and Anas Omar Adwan (SAASST Maintenance Engineer).