- Ayham Ratrout
- Cole Reinholt
- Bethany Kavanagh
- Professor David Kazdan
- Professor Gregory Lee
The purpose of this project is to develop a system that allows Case Western Reserve University’s Amateur Radio Club to automatically locate and reflect a 2 meter radio signal off of the moon. The Amateur Radio Club’s existing mount solution is electrically powered and uses two servo motors. However, as of right now, the servo motors are manually controlled thus requiring constant manual adjustment to track objects as they move across the sky. As a result of this, the Amateur Radio Club has been rather unsuccessful locating the moon and reflecting 2 meter radio waves off of it as they managed to accomplish Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication only once since the device was first deployed.
- Test and verify the functionality of the manual control for the motors’ azimuth movement.
- Automate the motors’ azimuth movement control by collecting real-time moon location data.
- Attempt to send radio signals to the moon and capture the reflected wave.
- Accuracy of the rotator - Rotor angle should be within 3.5 degrees of the desired angle
- MQTT Load Testing - For a load of 100 users, the failure rate should be less than 50%
- UI Survey - Each feature should be easily understood by 50% of users
Case Western Reserve University’s Amateur Radio Club currently has and operates a highly directional antenna which is situated on top of the Glennan Building. As of today, the antenna is steered by two servo motors, one controlling movement in the azimuth plane while the other controls the movement in the elevation plane. These two axes allow the antenna to point to specific celestial coordinates. The Amateur Radio club has been deploying this antenna in an attempt to reflect 2 meter radio waves off of the moon as well as capture the reflected waves. However, despite the numerous attempts, the Amateur Radio Club has been successful in reflecting the 2 meter radio waves off of the moon only once due to challenges imposed by the level of precision needed when it comes to positioning the antenna. These precision woes exist because the two servo motors driving the position of the antenna need to be manually controlled which, in turn, negatively affects the alignment precision and delivers rather poor results. The moon also moves throughout the night sky which means that by the time an operator has focused the antenna, the move could have moved out of position. With that being said, by adding automated controls which track the moon’s position by gathering real-time moon location information and adjust the position of the antenna accordingly, human errors are eliminated which allows for more precision and accuracy when attempting to reflect radio signals off of the lunar surface.