Re:Designing a Home Radio Telescope for 21 Cm Emission
by dylan604 on Monday November 04, 2024 @09:27PM
(#42048089)
How large is that dish? It doesn’t look much different in size to old school ku-band satellites that were common before cable became ubiquitous.
Re:Designing a Home Radio Telescope for 21 Cm Emission
by spacedcowboy on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @12:23PM
(#42065710)
It's about 14' across. It is in fact a ku-band satellite dish, but these were nowhere near as popular in the UK as they were in the US. I was searching for about 6 months before I found one up for sale.
I had it all packed up when moving out to the US (because my imagination told me that houses in the US were far larger than in the UK). The house I ended up buying (despite having a much larger back garden) didn't have the space to set it up again and remain married, so two decades later, it's still in that wooden case... I do, however, have an optical telescope set up (#2)
Back then, we didn't have easy access to SDR's, so there's a feed horn, a down-converter, and I had an external (standalone) WinRadio receiver to actually listen to the feed. That went into an audio card on a linux box, and the waterfall display was beautiful :)
#1: https://imgur.com/a/CDrEeII
#2: https://imgur.com/a/askar-130phq-scope-sb-myt-mount-26mp-cam...