BRAMS Newsfeed
First flight of the drone in Humain
In the framework of the STCE, we have hired Antonio Martinez to calibrate the BRAMS antennas (and some antennas for solar applications in Humain). As presented during the annual BRAMS meeting, the method is to use a UAV/drone equipped with a transmitter sending a given power at a given frequency. The drone can fly in GPS-controlled mode, meaning that it goes to some specific locations pre-registered in its memory. These locations are chosen in order to be in the far-field of the antenna (typically 3 meters for the BRAMS antennas but we will fly a bit further). The transmitter has been designed at BISA and is ready. It will be added very soon as payload below the drone together with a small dipole-like antenna. In order to prevent the modification of the radiation pattern of this emitting antenna by the metallic arms of the drone, a small grid (attached to a cardboard) has been added to the drone to act as a reflecting plane. Last week Antonio made the first tests with flying the drone in Humain. You can see some pictures below. From left to right, (a) the drone flying (OptoKopter with 8 rotors, the cardboard is clearly visible below the drone), (b) the drone flying near the solar antenna, (c) the drone flying above 2 antennas of our interferometer in Humain The two pictures below show the remote control system of the drone as well as the box containing the transmitter that we will use as payload (as well as a battery).
BRAMS annual meeting at MIRA observatory on 05/04/2014
On April 5, we had our BRAMS annual meeting at the MIRA observatory in Grimbergen. Thank you to all the participants and to Philippe Mollet and the people at the observatory to have welcomed us once again. You can find links to the presentations below :
- Status of the BRAMS activities & online tool for manual counts (H. Lamy)
- Analysis of the noise in spectrograms (H. Lamy)
- Essai de détection automatique d'échos de météores au moyen de techniques de traitement d'images (P. Ernotte)
- Comparison between manual & automatic counts (S. Calders)
- Calibrator for BRAMS (M. Anciaux)
- Directional patterns of the antennas : simulations and future in-situ measurements with an UAV (A. Martinez)
- The FRIPON network (Jean-Louis Rault)
BRAMS beacon off between 10:00 and 10:37 AM this morning
Dear all, apologies for the beacon being off this morning. This time, it was on purpose as we had to make some measurements and tests there. UPS is indeed dead but we found the way to automatically restart the signal generator in the correct configuration. So in principle we should not have anymore long periods without signals. We also found a place to install the FRIPON camera in the future.
Next annual BRAMS meeting
The BRAMS annual meeting will be organized at the MIRA observatory in Grimbergen on Saturday 5 April 2014 from 09:30 AM to 12:30 PM. We would like to thank the people at the MIRA observatory to welcome us once again. The detailed programme will be published soon. Everyone is welcome to participate.
Workshop FRIPON/BRAMS at BISA
On Thursday 30 January 2014, we had the pleasure to welcome our French colleagues from IMCCE (Paris, France) at BISA : François Colas presented the French optical network FRIPON (Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network) while Jérémie Vaubaillon presented CABERNET (The CAmera for BEtter Resolution NETwork). The presentation of FRIPON can be downloaded here. Some technical details about the FRIPON cameras can be found here. The afternoon was devoted to radar observations. The status and recent developments of BRAMS were presented. The presentation can be downloaded here. Jean-Louis Rault finally presented a comparison of meteor observations with analog and digital (SDR) receivers. You can also download his presentation. The goal of the workshop was to discuss about the complementarity of the BRAMS and FRIPON networks and to see how FRIPON can be extended to Belgium. It has been decided to add a few fish-eye cameras in Belgium under the responsability of BISA. The first camera will be located in Uccle. Other places will be University of Liège and Centre de Géophysique du Globe in Dourbes.
New BRAMS station in Seneffe
A new BRAMS station has been set up in Seneffe. Thanks to David Erzeel and Patrick Mertens for taking care of the local installation. Thanks to IBPT for hosting the station.
News about the interferometer in Humain
Finally, works in Humain have re-started again. The tranches have been done and cables will soon be added to connect the 5 antennas to the receivers which will now be located in a small container (instead of a much smaller box as was planned before). The container can be seen in one of the images below. Next step is to install electrical power and internet access through an optical fiber and we will be able to start the initial tests.