Modeling Cosmic-Ray Air Showers in Hardware for a Broadband Radio Detector

The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) is a balloon-based radio particle detector. The low-frequency (LF) instrument on PUEO, which was built to detect cosmic-ray air showers, has a separate beamforming trigger. This presentation will detail the development of the LF instrument, which consists of an 8-antenna deployable antenna array operating in the 50-500 MHz frequency range. We will also present an Arbitrary Signal Generator (ASG) which was used to test the trigger performance of the LF instrument. Any waveform can be programmed into the ASG; simulated cosmic-ray radio signals were used for this test of the LF trigger. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the ASG output can be adjusted to test the efficiency of the trigger with respect to SNR. Furthermore, the ASG produces five channels of signal which can each undergo polarity flips or time delays in order to form the beams of the trigger.