Radio Pulsar Signal Generator

Pulsars have been an object of research in several fields notably gravitational waves, the cosmos itself, deep-space navigation, plane localization methods, among others. Pulsar signals have periods ranging from miliseconds to seconds with extremely large period accuracy, comparable to that of atomic clocks. The pulsar signal itself also has a very large bandwidth These characteristics make conventional circuit simulation techniques unusable. This paper considers the characteristics of the pulsar signals and implements a prototype that generates a signal resembling the signals emitted by pulsars i.e., a pulsar generator. Such a simulator is very useful to assess pulsar receiver real time performance because pulsar signals are very difficult to capture on Earth due to its very low power, large bandwidth an also because of atmospheric effects which degrade the signal. The prototype allows to simulate different pulsar signals, in real time and is portable. Furthermore, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) can be adjusted from -14.9 to 19.7 dB and the signal bandwidth can me modified by using a set of different filters.