SkyScanner

My current location is in a small village with houses having solar panels, inverters, bad switching mode power supplies, not to mention all the electronic equipment I have in my own house. I have some directions where there are more noise than other directions, and it would be good to somehow visualize that.
The idea about the "SkyScanner" was born. This is a "project under development" and somewhat experimental. If it ever will be finished I don't know, at least I have/will learn something during the development, which is pretty much why I do stuff like this :)

The need got bigger and triggered me to do something about it when I installed my 70cm EME system. On EME, every 0.1 dB counts, and as I always try to optimize whatever I'm doing, I started the SkyScanner project.

SkyScanner is basically a PC (Windows) application that will control a Az/El rotor for your antennas, sample the audio from a transceiver (via soundcard or built-in soundcard in the radio) and present the measured "noise" from the transceiver and map this on a "dome".

Once the "sky has been scanned", the idea is that you can leave the application running, it will then always show you the current antenna position (by coloring the zone the antenna currently points to). The plan is also to show the moons current position on the dome.

Currently, the SkyScanner can control my own rotorcontroller, Yaesu GS-232 based controllers and PSTRotator. I plan on extending this, probably by sending out Az/El pairs over a socket or some other way so that other controllers can be controlled.

The audio from the transceiver is sampled via Windows sound system, so no special needs there.

As I mentioned, this is a project "under development", but once it gets to a usable state, I will make it available here for download to anyone interested.

Below you will find a couple of screenshots and a video showing the fundamental operation.

More info will follow.

Screenshots

Avoiding scanning specific areas

Some installations might have limitations on where the antenna(s) can be pointed. This can be due to cable restrictions, you might not be able to access the area around north from the ground to zenith because of cables or mechanical limitations.

In SkyScanner, you can define a list of "keep out zones", SkyScanner will not show these zones that are included in the areas, and the antenna will not be able to be commanded into this area either.

The algorithm behind this is not super clever, so you might end up needing to move the antennas to the area being scanned yourself, its not so that SkyScanner does a lot of route planning etc to get to a certain point. It will just command the rotor(s) to move to a specific Az/El.

But, it will monitor the current rotor position, and if it enters one of the defined "not allowed" zones, it will stop the rotor, you then have to move the rotor out from the area again before continuing.

Scanning South to West

The screenshots below shows a complete scan from south to west, horizon to zenith. The zones not measured was too close to the sun and was automatically skipped by the program. I can the re-visit these once the sun is out of the way. The full scan too 1 hour on my 70cm EME array.

After the sun moved out of the way, the last zones were selected and scanned.

The single "gray" zone is the current moon position and the lonely orange is the current sun position.

Demo video

Interfacing to PSTRotator

The data

The data that is being collected by SkyScanner is saved to a database, I'm using LiteDB, a small and relatively simple database. You can use the data in the database(s) for your own usage too if needed. Each record has information about the azimuth, elevation, timestamp, validity of measurement, the resolution of the zones measured (more on that later) and the measured noise level (in dB).

If you need to use the data from the database, the class in C# that holds each record looks like this: