RAIL is a multidisciplinary group in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University, working on engineering and science problems in radio astronomy — open hardware, SDR and FPGA signal processing, archive-scale analysis pipelines, and a classroom curriculum used by teachers across the country.
wvurail.org · people · publications · contact
You want to teach radio astronomy, or build a telescope with students.
→ DSPIRA lessons — 47 lessons written by
the high school teachers who ran them: build a horn telescope from a paint-thinner
can and a sheet of foil-faced insulation board, assemble the amplifier, run a
spectrometer, then observe the Milky Way and derive its rotation curve. Free and
printable. If sourcing the SDR and the amplifier is what's stopping you, the lab
sends starter kits to educators.
Source: dspira-lessons.
You want to build the hardware.
→ os_radio_astro_hw for the 1420 MHz
hydrogen-line amplifier, gr-radio_astro
for the GNU Radio blocks that turn it into a working spectrometer.
You're a student joining the lab.
→ Read CONTRIBUTING.md
first. If you're starting a new analysis, don't start from an empty directory —
use datatrawl-analyzer-template.
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
gr-radio_astro |
The lab's GNU Radio out-of-tree module. Blocks for power spectra, integration, dedispersion, event detection, correlation, and HDF5/CSV sinks. |
datatrawl |
Streams a telescope archive through your analyzer with a bounded scratch footprint and resumable checkpoints, so an interrupted run doesn't start over. |
datatrawl-analyzer-template |
Template repo. "Use this template" and you have an installable, tested datatrawl plugin without touching datatrawl itself. |
pilot-proxy |
F-statistic detector for ATSC digital-TV signals, using the narrow pilot tone as a proxy for the broadband data shelf. CUDA kernel plus a GNU Radio testbench. |
gr-transient |
Radio transient detection pipeline — OOT modules, flowgraph testbenches, and the theory write-up. |
bao-noise-tolerance |
How much observing time does RFI masking cost a 21 cm BAO survey? Feed it masked-time fractions, get back required integration time and the penalty against an RFI-free survey. |
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
os_radio_astro_hw |
The DSPIRA hydrogen-line LNA — a 1420 MHz preamplifier for 21 cm observations. Altium schematic, PCB, Gerbers. Linked directly from the published curriculum. |
DigitalNoiseSource |
Digital noise source for receiver calibration — schematics and FPGA/RF firmware. |
rawice |
Reads raw ADC snapshots off ICE boards. |
keysight_network_analyser_control |
SCPI scripts driving a Keysight VNA for one- and two-port S-parameter capture. Windows only. |
rflab_test |
The rest of the RF bench: scripts for the lab's other instruments and measurements. |
Antenna_Test_Files |
561 Touchstone measurements from the antenna range, the scripts that took them, and the FieldFox calibration and testing procedure. The measurement archive, kept deliberately. |
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
lightwork |
The LightWork Memo series — informal numbered memoranda on citizen science with radio telescopes, begun by Glen Langston in 2015 and written with collaborators inside and outside the lab. Numbered 000–037 with some gaps; the repository README indexes them. |
Optimization-of-Radio-Array-Telescopes-to-Search-for-Fast-Radio-Bursts |
Cost-optimization analysis and manuscript source for Peterson, Bandura & Sanghavi, arXiv:2001.06526. |
| Repo | What it is |
|---|---|
dspira-lessons |
The current curriculum. Source for wvurail.org/dspira-lessons. |
wvurail.github.io |
Source for wvurail.org itself. Jekyll, GitHub Pages. |
These projects live upstream; we keep working branches here, and each keeps its own licence.
| Repo | Upstream |
|---|---|
kotekan |
kotekan/kotekan — high-performance radio data processing, which the lab helped originate; development lives upstream. Our default branch carries the PilotProxy DTV detector work. |
RadioFisher |
Phil Bull's Fisher forecasting code for 21 cm intensity mapping (AFL-3.0). Our default branch carries the CHIME RFI noise model. |
Kept so existing links and citations keep resolving. Don't start anything new here.
| Repo | Use instead |
|---|---|
cra |
dspira-lessons |
dspira |
dspira-lessons |
gr-dspira |
gr-radio_astro |
Once these are archived they drop out of the default repository list — set the Type filter to Archived to see them.
Students, collaborators and outside contributors are all welcome. The workflow —
branch, don't push to main; test before you push; open a PR — is in
CONTRIBUTING.md.
Every repository carries a licence. The GNU Radio modules are GPL-3.0,
because the code they build on is. Python tooling and instrument scripts are
MIT. Documents, measurements and site content are mostly CC0-1.0 — the
exceptions are dspira-lessons (MIT) and the FRB paper repository
(BSD-3-Clause). Check each repository's LICENSE file; the two forks above stay
under their upstream terms.
If you use the DSPIRA curriculum in a classroom, we'd like to hear about it: wvurail@gmail.com.
