Summer updates
We’ve been pretty busy with Signal Tide work in the last few months — so busy, in fact, that we’re a bit late updating the blog! So, let’s fix that now.
We’ve mostly been busy with work which is, well, boring. Much of the work on Signal Tide relies on combining different tasks together, or repeating the same tasks with slight variations, and there has also been plenty of work that is more-or-less administrative. All of which doesn’t exactly make for riveting reading.
However, there are some interesting things, so here’s an overview of what the last couple of months have involved.
Until pretty recently, we were still out in the German countryside, in the small village of Stolzenhagen. One of the advantages in being out in a place like this — which we’ve briefly mentioned before — is that monitoring radio signals tends to be easier, without the kind of interference from urban radio signals that would be present in cities or more built-up areas. In June, we got ourselves a VHF antenna from König, and decided to name it Sue. We’ve had pretty good results with Sue — we’ve been receiving consistently clear, strong signals from the LES-1, which have also all had clear, present ‘dips’ in them (unlike the mysterious ‘non-dipping’ signals from earlier in the summer).
We’ve been becoming more familiar with running our GNU Radio applications, despite a few crashes and hiccups along the way. However, we’re still trying to figure out some software knots related to noise cancellation, doppler-shift correction, and signal tracking — if you, dear reader, might know anything about these points (or know anyone else who does), and might be willing to help, we would be thrilled to hear from you!
Separately from this, we’ve been putting the website live, working on mixes for the accompanying music, working on 3D-printing plans for the speaker enclosures, and working on plans for the time we’ll be spending back in Los Angeles in September, before we finally present the finished work at LACMA — but they’re all subjects for another post…
