Outreach - Used test equipment

[cpcfreak]

Hi Forum,

Looking for advice for hardware sources to develop a school outreach project. I've had some involvement in the past for primary and high school outreach for astronomy and physics. Mostly with that we've been conducting classes at school camps held in dark sky locations for optical astronomy. But one thing that is lacking is outreach in radio astronomy and that seems a glaring shortfall for a country involved in the SKA. I'm looking into the viability of building a portable demonstrator that can be used to give kids a taste of radio asstronomy and in particular interferometry. Basically the intention is to build a demonstrator that can be laid out on a sports field and give kids a taste of interferomentry, because real world signals are so low or noisey we'd have a synthetic source with at least a two antenna array that allows kids to move the source and correlate position with phase shifts, etc., etc.. To do this we need reasonably capable equipment, oscilloscopes, signal generators, frequency counters, etc., etc.. There are it seems many such commecial solutions in the test and measurement industry, but they are just too expensive, without a the luxury of a grant. Our whole startup budget wouldn't even pay for one oscilloscope.

I expect the final portable model would work in or below the 400Mhz range to emulate low frequency radio astronomy similar to what the SKA Low or MWA operate.

One thing that is important for outreach is safety, for this reason we are very keen on hardware that can be operated over a network, having a remote display, keyboard, mouse, etc, etc.. if possible something with an available software library that is hackable, so we can apply perhaps build a custom solution and apply constraints to how kids drive the system. Often this sort of remote requirement appears in automated testing solutions, and combined with the 400Mhz capability it seems the dollars skyrocket.

So I'm hoping someone in the industry might be able to point us to towards reasonably priced source of used or obsolete test equipment that we can purchase to repurpose for the project. I suspect as the communications industry moves towards 5G there must be bucket loads of capable test and measurement hardware being made redundant, assuming some is prepared to let it go cheaply enough which is a separate issue!

[El Rubio]

Do you have a school system or charitable tax ID for a corporation to make a tax deductable donation? I would put together a request letter and send it and/ or call every major manufacturer. Getting to the right people is the problem. I would start with sales and not cust service.
Most large companies that replace older gear often trade those pieces in for credit towards the new gear.
The tax dedduction could be more valuable for some devices than trying to sell them to the used gear dealers. They will want to see a legitimate organization with a specific plan. Put minimum specs into your request for specific type devices.

[cpcfreak]

Thanks El Rubio, that is very good advice. I'm not actually the outreach person, I'm just the amateur astronomer trying to work out the details of setting it up, but I'm sure the teachers I'm working with can get the structures in place or may already have it setup. So I'll take your advice and make some approaches.

It's an interesting time, right now is probably the peak era for 2nd hand / used equipment, if modern laws take hold over the next decade or so a lot of 2nd-hand / used market will evaporate as companies start comply with the various regional return, re-use and recycle laws.

As an aside, I've noticed modern digital hardware seems to lose value faster than older high end analogue gear. I had not expected that, I was expecting to find good deals on old analogue or early digital systems, say kit that is 10 to 20 years old, but that stuff seems to hold it's value when it is in good working order.

[Muttley Snickers]

There are some very generous members on this forum and no doubt there will be a few willing to assist but you need to help them help you by declaring your location. (Click on my image to see my profile and location). Test equipment can be a real pain to properly pack and ship not to mention hugely expensive, in fact a very generous member recently drove 150kms (300kms round trip) to deliver a very nice power supply to me and he refused to accept even petrol money. Good luck with the project.   

[cpcfreak]

There are some very generous members on this forum and no doubt there will be a few willing to assist but you need to help them help you by declaring your location.

Noted neighbour, thanks for the tip.

I'd be happy to pick stuff up or arrange collection, I probably cannot justify shipping stuff from OS due to costs.

At bit about myself. I'm not an electronic / electrical engineer although I've studied basic electronics years and years ago, day to day I work with lasers, optics, interferometers and robotics, using test equipment for maintenance and calibration. The bulk of the stuff I deal with is either TTL or Rf below 40Mhz, some AODs and AOMs have dedicated Rf drivers that use FM in the 1GHz band but these are sealed boxes. Other than attaching a counter to check the FM centre frequency, most of my electronic servicing work involves DC, AM or Comms, most of my eelctronics work is doing speed calibration / stability stuff on DC or AC drives so it barely qualifies by many standards. I do a bit of development work with IoT sensors and the like, for both work and hobby which is about my limit. So even if I can get the kit I'm going to need help so I best start building a network of either interested techs or corporate donours.

For reference I have my own home test equipment, analogue oscilloscope 50Mhz and DSO 100Mhz, as well as access to 200Mhz DSO and 60MHz AWG at work. I've made some prelimnary tests and this level of kit won't cut it otherwise I'd just build around what I've got and donate it.

My hope is to keep it as simple yet as authentic as possible for kids, so the model should operate somewhere in the 140 MHz - 400 Mhz range, and I gather that probably means I need gear rated to 1GHz given a lot of interferometry will involve measuring phase differences in the nanosecond scale. In real life radio astronomers collect and store massive amounts of realtime data at high time resolution and use a correlator to combine this at a later time to display the result. I'm obviously not going to be able to do that, it's not tenable for an outreach teacher to host a lesson and tell the kids come back next week for the result. Usually these classes are special events that a school schedules to happen in an afternoon or morning session on a single day. So having stuff that can be networked and PC controlled to collect and build real time data plots without storing / crunching too much the data will be critical, thus giving the kids results on the day to take back to class to link into STEM studies.

Sounds simple but I know it isn't, but the math is deceptively simple which is why we can target late primary and early secondary students.