Super Cheap Scintillation Console: Literate-Pancake (ePoster)

The goal of this project is to make yet another "low cost" console for calculating scintillation caused by ionospheric irregularities. Using some of the cheapest devices that come up in a simple google search for gps receivers and computers we've kept cost below $60 USD. As an exercise in seeing if anything useful can be obtained by bashing the cheapest stuff on the internet together, who knows, they may even be capable of making useful observations to detect ionospheric irregularities. At this low barrier to entry, both in terms of cost and programming experience, this is intended to be an introductory project using GPS that goes beyond location tracking, and involves ionospheric science that Ham Radio operators are already familiar with. Some basic software has been produced to process the NMEA data from the device and process it enough to produce the scintillation data product. Currently under development, this software is public and open source. Although this device is certainly of a lower quality than many more expensive set ups, the end result is at least superficially comparable to some of the other inexpensive devices that are still several times more expensive. Some rudimentary scinillation detection can be performed, obtaining where and when scintillation is occurring. The hard part now, is finding the right combination of data product and online accesss to make historical scintillation data available to future scientists. With mass market parts and completely free and open source software, perhaps this community can even find novel uses for this data beyond the intent of this work.