The new radio telescope and update at LRO
¿ªÔÆÌåÓýHi All,
Here is the new addition at LRO (Lichfield Radio Obaervatory, www.astronomy.network) - this radio telescope is built using a 1.5m solar cooker dish. These cost around ?50 plus postage. The feed is my homemade hydrogen-tuned cantenna repurposed
but turning it around. Some hammering, sawing, screws and fence paint using ?5 worth of cheap off-cuts of wood from local hardware shop and I have a serviceable mount that allows elevation to be changed. The scope works by collecting drift scans so azimuth
does not need to be changed. A Nooelec SAWBird H1 LNA and RTL-SDR Blog SDR and cheap MINI PC from Ebay and Bob's your uncle = a fully functioning 1420MHz radio telescope.
After a bit of a competition using members of SARA and my local Rosliston Astronomy Group in Derbyshire, the telescope has been named Dishy McDishFace. For those of you who are aware of my other hydrogen line scope based on a 86cm ex-military
Ptarmigan 4x4 band 3 dipole array, that scope has been named The Signal Snatcher.
On another point, my laptop is now caught up completing a 3 day processing run on my hydrogen data over last 12 months using new settings in ezCon (part of ezRA - Easy Radio Astronomy suite by Ted Cline).
Andy
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Hi, I've also purchased one of the solar cooker dishes for?RA application and I saw of course you had to spray paint the mirror surface. A suggestion had been made to apply more spray paint. So how many coats of paint did you finally wind up applying to the dish surface? Also are you contemplating attempting observations outside of the Hydrogen 1420 MHz frequency say possibly?for the?6.7 GHz methanol? masers and do you have any idea if this dish surface is adaptable for this higher frequency after the paint application.? Thanks -- Adrian "My God, it's full of stars!" |
Tony Murphy
A. C.