Earth is surrounded by the electromagnetic spectrum.This spectrum contains a range of different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The spectrum extends from frequencies caused by natural phenomenons everywhere in space to frequencies used by modern radio communication here on Earth.We created the BigWhoop: A system that will continuously monitor the spectrum and detect all signals within. We achieve this with low-cost , software-defined radio devices for each ground node for BigWhoop. With your help, we can deploy hundreds of these nodes forming a global internet connected sensor array for monitoring the spectrum!
To give you an example: The more BigWhoop nodes that we have, the more aircraft signals can be received and tracked during their paths around the world. This way, the planes won’t get lost that easily. But the BigWhoop can do more. We can detect places of high spectrum activities such as radio towers and tell you, when a new music channel starts its broadcast service. Or we can find sweet spots of radio silence where radio telescopes can be placed and listen to weak cosmic radio sources, that would have been drowned in man-made radio noise otherwise.
In the very spirit of NASA Space Apps Challenge and the open-source movement, the global community can modify BigWhoop for their out-of-the-box projects like tracking cube-sats or something yet out of our imagination! And the best thing is, we can already use BigWhoop system on our Constellation computation grid with 60,000 PCs donated by citizen scientists worldwide!With BigWhoop we will start with global spectrum monitoring -with you we will do extraordinary things!
