Searching for giga-Jansky fast radio bursts from the Milky Way with a
  global array of low-cost radio receivers
  If fast radio bursts (FRBs) originate from galaxies at cosmological
distances, then their all-sky rate implies that the Milky Way may host an FRB
on average once every 30-1500 years. If FRBs repeat for decades or centuies, a
local FRB could be active now. A typical Galactic FRB would produce a
millisecond radio pulse with ~1 GHz flux density of ~3E10 Jy, comparable to the
radio flux levels and frequencies of cellular communication devices (cell
phones, Wi-Fi, GPS). We propose to search for Galactic FRBs using a global
array of low-cost radio receivers. One possibility is to use the ~1GHz
communication channel in cellular phones through a Citizens-Science
downloadable application. Participating phones would continuously listen for
and record candidate FRBs and would periodically upload information to a
central data processing website, which correlates the incoming data from all
participants, to identify the signature of a real, globe-encompassing, FRB from
an astronomical distance. Triangulation of the GPS-based pulse arrival times
reported from different locations will provide the FRB sky position,
potentially to arc-second accuracy. Pulse arrival times from phones operating
at diverse frequencies, or from an on-device de-dispersion search, will yield
the dispersion measure (DM) which will indicate the FRB source distance within
the Galaxy. A variant of this approach would be to use the built-in ~100 MHz
FM-radio receivers present in cell phones for an FRB search at lower
frequencies. Alternatively, numerous "software-defined radio" (SDR) devices,
costing ~$10 US each, could be plugged into USB ports of personal computers
around the world (particularly in radio quiet regions) to establish the global
network of receivers.
