Welcome to Echoes homepage!
Echoes is an experimental spectral analysis software designed to detect, count and analyze the radio echoes
produced by meteors entering the atmosphere, an activity known as meteor scatter.
With Echoes it is possible to set up an autonomous entirely digital station without the use of additional software and which
is able to capture spectra of individual echoes and generate statistical reports automatically. The program is equipped with
filter functions to discard false positives due - for example - to lightning and manages an archive of events, divided by days
and of adjustable length in order to meet the storage capacity of the system and thus avoid filling up all available space.
Unlike general purpose programs such as SDR#, HDSDR, Winrad etc, which are generic multi-band and multi-mode radio receivers,
Echoes does not demodulate or decode the radio signal, so the spectrum it produces is exclusively radio spectrum and automatic
capture of echoes is based on the total received power peaks. Since there is no demodulation, there is no audio listening
except for a notification sound when an event has been logged.
Finally, Echoes is able to operate, albeit with reduced performance and functionality, even on older PCs, mini or micro such as
the Raspberry-PI, both in a Windows and Linux environment.
ps. If you like Echoes and have a SourceForge.net account, please rate
this project, Thanks.
LATEST NEWS
September 06, 2024
PothosSDR debug build for Windows released
In the Files section of the Echoes project on SourceForge I have uploaded - under Windows binaries - a zip file containing
a build of PothosSDR taking the repository sources on April 2024. It should be copied under c:\program files
replacing the existing one in case you experiment bad behavior in Echoes.
This could happen specially if you work with SDR different than RTL-SDR.
I needed to create this build in order to make the Audio device work correctly under Echoes.
I'm currently doing some tests on my Windows laptop making an Airspy dongle work under SDR#
and catching the audio into Echoes. Having not a real VHF SSB/CW radio receiver, this is the unique
way I have to test automatic capture mode through an audio device.
July 16, 2024
Echoes 0.57 + Ebrow 0.1.82
These versions include some bufgixes that were the result of a remote debug session with the
Calina Observatory in Lugano (CH), plagued by the presence of strong signals
of human origin, one of which falls within the detection range for GRAVES and others located in the aeronautical band
around 120MHz that cause frequent saturation of the receiver.
About the first signal, a notch filter had already
been positioned in Echoes, but I also had to deactivate the anti-carrier filters CAR1 and CAR2, because the cancellation
of the disturbance in the detection range was still mistaken for a carrier by these filters, thus discarding good events.
About the saturations instead, I was able to observe that due to their strict periodicity, the SAT filter in Ebrow was made to function
poorly by taking for saturation what was not, and when a saturation event is taken as a good event, its N level
is taken as a reference, ultimately discarding all subsequent events.
The probability of this happening is quite high when the receiver saturates every twenty seconds - as in the case
of Calina - for periods of several minutes.
The actual code change in Ebrow consists in adding a new parameter to the SAT anti-saturation filter.
This parameter is a value of N to be used as a reference to detect sudden drops in N caused by receiver saturation,
overriding the self-calculated N reference.
Of course, besides this software modification, installing a hardware bandpass filter becomes seriously recommended in cases like these.
In Ebrow has been also fixed the displaying of configuration tables, which now show the complete history of all
changes made to the RTS file instead of the latest only, so that it is possible to trace how Echoes was configured
when a certain event has been captured.
The fix made in Echoes instead concerns the saving of the changes made to the program configuration.
Every time you save the rts file after a configuration change, the revision number is incremented. All this must
also apply to the database too, this because each event recorded in the database refers to a specific revision
of the rts file.
However, this database update only occurred by saving the rts with a different name; so, further changes in the same
rts could lead to crashes in Ebrow while trying to open that database. This shouldn't happen anymore.
The updated releases can be downloaded as usual from Echoes SourceForge page
as usual.
July 02, 2024
In the project files section, on SourceForge file area
is now available the Ubuntu 24.04 package of Echoes 0.56.
Please pay attention because this package could give some installation problems, since Canonical has changed the name of the libliquid2d library (which is now called libliquid1). So, the Echoes package does not find it, and will not install, unless you first install libliquid2d (downloadable together with Echoes for Ubuntu 24.04 at the same link above).
June 17, 2024
Ebrow 0.1.81
In the last few days on the GABB.IT station a problem emerged in the generation of the daily report.
By visiting https://www.gabb.it/echoes/latest_report/ and clicking the links listed under "Exported events image gallery",
it could happen to find images that referred to events other than those clicked.
It also happened that instead of screenshots, 3D graphs appeared.
The problem originated from a bug in Ebrow, in the AutoExport function.
This bug has been corrected now, and version 0.1.81 has been published, which can be found as usual
in the project files section, on SourceForge file area
(source and exe for Windows) and on PyPI.
May 28, 2024
Echoes 0.56 + Ebrow 0.1.80
This release of Echoes includes a better Airspy support, since I purchased one.
My intention is to replace with it the Nongles N3 RTL-SDR on GABB.IT station. However, this won't happen before
July 6, because I want to fill its database by covering an entire year using the same receiver.
The rts file I used for my tests has been added to the project as TEST_AUTOMATIC_AIRSPY.rts.
The changes to Echoes code were necessary because using Airspy with Echoes 0.55 a crash occurred immediately upon
startup, due - as I later discovered - to an error in the SoapyAirspy support library. The error has already been fixed
in its sources repository, however I still
implemented a workaround in Echoes in order to avoid that error condition while working with released versions of SoapyAirspy
(its Windows DLL dates back to 2021).
Airspy also does not handle the tuning error compensation
- or at least, its support library doesn't - so the relative control in
the device tab now gets disabled when opening an Airspy device.
New traces have been added to the dump file relating to the mean difference and the two thresholds so that they can be
displayed on power plot. The new traces have been added to both binary and
ASCII dumps.
The Preferences table is now updated every time the Echoes version changes. In this way,
the Echoes version showed in Ebrow is always up to date and the user doesn't need to force changes in configuration
to update the rts file data.
Other fixes were necessary to resolve the following bugs:
- Crash occurred while changing the opened device via the device selector on the main window.
- Crash occurred when using dongles equipped with an Elonics E4000 tuner
(e.g. Funcube, Terratec Cinergy)
when attempting to tune a frequency that fell within its 1GHz tuning hole.
- Crash occurred when packets were received at UDP port 12345 in a format not recognized by Echoes.
The latter occurred often on the GABB.IT station in the last two months but I couldn't understand
what was generating those packets; in any case, after the fix the problem never recurred again.
About Ebrow, this version presents an interesting new feature: the automatic export of peculiar event screeshots and graphs
while generating the HTML report. A example of such report can be seen
here
Besides this, other there are other news:
- the RFI filter now implements a better detection of repeating RFI patterns
- the events and statistic graphs now fit the entire pane at zoom 1x
- the statistic counts can be compensated with sporadic background, to fix data affected by many fake
events
- the progress bar now has been moved to the status bar, at window's bottom, in order to be visible regardless the selected tab.
- added 2 new pushbuttons to set the date coverage to last(current) month or last(current) year in one click.
