Warkworth 12-m VLBI Station: WARK12M

This report summarizes the geodetic VLBI activities in New Zealand in 2010. It provides geographical and technical details of WARK12M - the new IVS network station operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy and Space Research (IRASR) of Auckland University of Technology (AUT). The details of the VLBI system installed in the station are outlined along with those of the collocated GNSS station. We report on the status of broadband connectivity and on the results of testing data transfer protocols; we investigate UDP protocols such as 'tsunami' and UDT and demonstrate that the UDT protocol is more efficient than 'tsunami' and 'ftp'. In general, the WARK12M IVS network station is fully equipped, connected and tested to start participating in regular IVS observational sessions from the beginning of 2011.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, Accepeted for the IVS 2010 Annual Repor

Taking Saratoga from Space-Based Ground Sensors to Ground-Based Space Sensors

The Saratoga transfer protocol was developed by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) for its Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellites. In over seven years of operation, Saratoga has provided efficient delivery of remote-sensing Earth observation imagery, across private wireless links, from these seven low-orbit satellites to ground stations, using the Internet Protocol (IP). Saratoga is designed to cope with high bandwidth-delay products, constrained acknowledgement channels, and high loss while streaming or delivering extremely large files. An implementation of this protocol has now been developed at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) for wider use and testing. This is intended to prototype delivery of data across dedicated astronomy radio telescope networks on the ground, where networked sensors in Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) instruments generate large amounts of data for processing and can send that data across private IP- and Ethernet-based links at very high rates. We describe this new Saratoga implementation, its features and focus on high throughput and link utilization, and lessons learned in developing this protocol for sensor-network applications.Comment: Preprint of peer-reviewed conference paper accepted by and to appear at the IEEE Aerospace 2011 conference, Big Sky, Montana, March 201

A Flexible, Low-Power, Programmable Unsupervised Neural Network Based on Microcontrollers for Medical Applications

We present an implementation and laboratory tests of a winner takes all (WTA) artificial neural network (NN) on two microcontrollers (μC) with the ARM Cortex M3 and the AVR cores. The prospective application of this device is in wireless body sensor network (WBSN) in an on-line analysis of electrocardiograph (ECG) and electromyograph (EMG) biomedical signals. The proposed device will be used as a base station in the WBSN, acquiring and analysing the signals from the sensors placed on the human body. The proposed system is equiped with an analog-todigital converter (ADC), and allows for multi-channel acquisition of analog signals, preprocessing (filtering) and further analysis