A team of Queen’s engineers has answered the call to improve the quality of cell phone service for cell phone s everywhere.
Last week, Physical Plant Services contractor Morton Cranes used a crane to lift the Queen’s solar radio telescope about 21 metres off ground level, to be mounted atop Jeffery Hall. The telescope, which is just over 3 metres tall, is visible from University Avenue.
Starting this spring at the earliest, the solar radio telescope will begin to gather data the engineers say will be instrumental in developing cell phones that are resistant to interference caused by fluctuations in the sun’s energy output. The team must fine-tune the telescope in the coming months before it becomes fully functional.
“The historical motivation for this project comes from our supervisor, Dr. David J. Thomson,” said Ben Gardiner, MSc in mathematics and statistics, and the lead engineer on the project. “He did a study at Bell Labs over 1996 to 1997, which indicated that there’s a link between small changes in solar energy output—also called solar flux—and dropped cell phone call rates.”
Gardiner has been working on this project for a year and a half, along with his teammates Lindsay Smith, Sci ’06, and Robert Carkner, Sci ’05.
After securing a t grant from the Canadian Fund for Infrastructure/Innovation and Ontario Innovation Trust, Thomson and his team were able to build the Queen’s solar radio telescope to further investigate the problem of solar interference with cell phone reception. “Our scope listens to the radio frequencies coming out of the sun,” Gardiner explained. “Typical solar radio telescopes measure solar energy output on a large time-scale—about a second. Ours can capture a wave-form by taking samples a million times per second.”
Gardiner said the project is important because it’s the first in a new generation of solar radio telescopes of this calibre. “This is quite a unique piece of equipment,” he said.
Gardiner added that last week marks a milestone for his team, as 90 per cent of the mechanical systems are now assembled and working on the roof of Jeffery Hall.
Although the team has been working towards this goal for a year, he said, they still have more to do.
Gardiner estimated the project will continue for another year and a half before the data his team collects can be used by researchers.
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