Improved version: giant pulse on two bands

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.© CC-BY 4.0 Tammo Jan Dijkema

Last week we showed an image of a giant pulse of the Crab pulsar simultaneously observed with two SDRs (software defined radios) attached to the Dwingeloo telescope. This gave us 120 MHz of bandwidth.

We overlooked one thing: one of the SDRs has the option to record two 100MHz channels, tuned at different frequencies. Using this option, we can now record 220MHz of bandwidth: 200MHz on one SDR, 20MHz on the other. To test this, we recorded another giant pulse of the Crab pulsar, shown in this image. The bottle neck now almost becomes the recording computer: just opening a web browser on it crashed the recording.

This giant pulse is not a very bright one: we were tied for time, as the farewell reception of Ronald Halfwerk started at 14:30 UTC. We're confident that with a bit more waiting, we can observe a brighter giant pulse and make an even nicer image.