Engineering topics

Quirk, M. P.

Publications and source records attributed to Quirk, M. P..

5 records

NASA NTRS1988

A wideband, high-resolution spectrum analyzer

A two-million-channel, 40 MHz bandwidth, digital spectrum analyzer under development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is described. The analyzer system will serve as a prototype processor for the sky survey portion of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program and for other applications in the Deep Space Network. The analyzer digitizes an analog input, performs a 2 (sup 21) point Discrete Fourier Transform, accumulates the output power, normalizes the output to remove frequency-dependent gain, and automates simple signal detection algorithms. Due to its built-in frequency-domain processing functions and configuration flexibility, the analyzer is a very powerful tool for real-time signal analysis.

Quirk, M. P.↗

NASA NTRS1986

Objectives and first results of the NASA SETI sky survey field tests at Goldstone

Field tests of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) prototype hardware and software began in March 1985 at Goldstone. With emphasis on the sky survey component of the NASA SETI search strategy, the article describes the survey characteristics, the detection strategy, and preliminary results of system tests.

Gulkis, S.↗

NASA NTRS1985

A wide-band, high-resolution spectrum analyzer

A million-channel, 20 MHz-bandwidth, digital spectrum analyzer under evelopment for use in the SETI Sky Survey and other applications in the Deep Space Network is described. The analyzer digitizes an analog input, performs a 2(20)-point Radix-2, Fast Fourier Transform, accumulates the output power, and normalizes the output to remove frequency-dependent gain. The effective speed of the real-time hardware is 2.2 GigaFLOPS.

Wilck, H. C.↗

NASA NTRS1985

A signal detection strategy for the SETI All Sky Survey

A source detection strategy for the SETI All Sky Survey is described. The method is designed to detect continuous wave (or very narrowband) sources transitting an antenna beam. The short-time spectra of the received signal are accumulated, and candidate extraterrestrial sources are recognized by the recognized by the presence of narrowband power exceeding a threshold function. The threshold function is derived using a Neyman-pearson hypothesis test.

Lawton, W.↗

NASA NTRS1985

High-speed Digital Baseband Mixer

The feasibility of designing a digital, complex, baseband mixer with a 50 MHz sampling rate is explored. The baseband filter must provide passbands with linear phase response to minimize intersymbol interference. The effects of signal quantization, filter coefficient quantization, dynamic range, filter response characteristics, and the performance of the mixer when used for cross correlation and autocorrelation pulse detection techniques are discussed. This filter was designed for use in the high speed data acquisition system (HSDAS), an advanced experimental system in the Deep Space Network.

Chan, F. P.↗