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.
LATEST NEWS
Nov 19, 2023
Released Ebrow 0.1.62.
Starting from this version, the Create Subset button is fully functional. Its purpose is to save a portion of the open
database, which can later be managed more quickly with Ebrow.
see Creating subsets.
Nov 17, 2023
Released Echoes 0.53 + Ebrow 0.1.61.
Starting from this version, the format of the dump files changes: it will no longer be an ASCII file but a more compact binary file
with the .DATB extension. Consequently, Ebrow 0.1.61 or later must be used to view the dumps of both formats (DAT | DATB).
Oct 13, 2023
32bit Raspbian11 image is now ready for download, available as usual in the the
Downloads Page
The documentation in here is still valid also for this 32 bit image, taking in count that Ebrow
is not present so neither RMOB data uploading will be possible, at least for now.
Oct 11, 2023
In these days, I tried to create the Raspbian11 image also in 32bit to support older Raspberry PIs.
Unfortunately, I encountered compatibility problems with Pandas and Numpy and despite my juggling with
the versions of the various packages on which Ebrow depends, I still haven't succeeded
to make it work.
So currently this 32bit image only contains Echoes pre-installed.
Using Samba it will still be possible to access the database from a PC running Ebrow.
That image runs even on Raspberry PI model 1. It will be released soon.
Regarding the released 64-bit image, I discovered that the remote access service agent
I used (DWservice) remains accessible even on hardware
other than the one on which it was activated; so yesterday while I was accessing my Raspberry from the office,
I realized after a few minutes that it wasn't mine (!)
I then proceeded to deactivate the agent directly on the server and create another one just for me.
However, it is also possible to deactivate the agent on the Raspberry side via its client
accessible from the System Tools / DWAgent menu, or remove it totally.
Oct 05, 2023
Released Echoes 0.52.
This is a bugfix version, no new features added.
Insertion of new events in database has been improved by adding a queuing mechanism to manage the
failed insertions due to temporary database unavailabilities. These can happen while accessing the
database with Ebrow while acquisition is still running.
Released also the Raspberry-PI 64bit ready SD-card image containing Raspberry PI OS 11 64bit and
the Echoes 0.52 + Ebrow 0.1.59 + RMOBclient_arm64 0.1 suite.
The new files are available in the the Downloads Page
Read here for further details.
Oct 01, 2023
Ebrow version 0.1.59 released. It fixes an embarrassing bug that caused the program to crash immediately upon first launch,
immediately after being installed on a computer on which it had never been installed before.
(thanks to Tarcisio - www.astrocalina.ch - for reporting).
This version also includes the new --multiple command line option that allows you to bypass the single instance constraint,
see Considerations about multiple instances.
Sep 19, 2023
Released a version of Ebrow, 0.1.54, which adds the following new features:
1 - The possible presence in the database of incomplete events, i.e. NOT associated with three records
(Raise, Peak, Fall), no longer causes errors in the program. They remain in the sqlite3 file but
are ignored by Ebrow. Below I will explain why these things happen.
2-Added a bar to view the progress of the DB loading/updating and event classification operations.
As to date, on our GABB.IT station, they take several minutes and the spinwheel is not reassuring enough.
3-An error in the saturation filter (SAT) has been corrected.
If you update to this version, remember to change the filter intervention threshold to an
initial value of 2%, and change it later if you are not satisfied.
Going back to point 1, I verified on our station that incomplete records are caused by Echoes if it were to run simultaneously
with Ebrow. In our case, this happens once an hour, to update the counts on RMOB, to which is added the creation of the report
once a day.
The database works in WAL mode; this allows the simultaneous writing and reading of a sqlite3 database by two different
processes running on the same machine.
Echoes only writes to the database, so everything works fine as long as Ebrow just reads it. However, when you run
it with the --rmob and --report options, Ebrow classifies the events detected in the time since its last execution
and implicitly saves them to the database file, so it also performs writes.
When this happens, and Echoes detects a new event, it also attempts to write the rising edge record to the DB
and receives a rejection. After a succession of 10 failed attempts spaced 5 seconds apart, Echoes gives up and
tries to write the peak record and maybe this time he makes it, or maybe not. The same thing can also happen
with the falling edge.
In this way, incomplete events or jumps in the progressive numbering of the IDs can be created. Also the
lasting time calculation gets completely broken, since it counts also the time taken to write into the database.
The next version of Echoes (0.52) will therefore include a fix for this problem.
