Welcome to the Sid Monitor Construction Site!

What I would like to do here is document 2 projects I'm working on directed at monitoring Sids. What is a Sid? It is a Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance. These are caused by solar flares and gamma ray out bursts from our sun. The principle of detection is to build a VLF receiver that looks for the affect of these events on the VLF carrier waves that the government uses to communicate to the submarine fleet. So, its a kind of a radio telescope.

The first project is to complete a Gyrator 3 receiver. The second is to build a simpler version described at http://www.aavso.org/print/simple-easy-build-sid-receiver .

The Gyrator3 project was started years ago. It's time to get it done! I set up a Google Group to share the learning curve. This still exists at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/gyrator-3-construction . But Google Groups devolved into a basic email focus rather than a blog where you could share files and pictures, so hence this blog.

So I'll try to capture progress and lessons-learned here. If you are interested in joining the fun, do sign into the Google Group mentioned above.

George