During the last days, I had the chance to record some radio astronomy data with my 1.4 GHz telescope. The receiver system is more or less unchanged compared to what I described in the last post, except that I have pretty versions of the amplifier and filter boards now: For the measurements I performed until now, I only used a small biquad antenna without parabolic reflector. The collecting area is […]
Much has happened since my last status report on my attempts to observe the galactic hydrogen emission at the famous 1420.4 MHz hyperfine structure line. Now, the new setup is finally proven to be basically working, and in this post I want to describe some of the changes I did. New data acquisition module Most importantly, I replaced the spectrum analyzer by a self-made data acquisition unit which is basically […]
With a reasonably simple setup, I finally succeeded in detecting the 1420.4 MHz galactic hydrogen hyperfine structure line: One of the first successful measurements. The little bulge in the center of the image is the hydrogen line. The sharp, high peaks are man-made interference and not part of the astronomical signal. The yellow line is with the telescope pointed towards the milky way, the pink line is for a different […]
When SSD disks popped up some time ago, many people’s main concern was their durability. The claimed 10k write cycles for each block didn’t really sound much to most people (including me). Still, I thought I’d risk it, and bought one (an 128GB Crucial/Micron RealSSD m4/C400) about one and a half years ago. The speedup is noticeable, especially for things which need short access times (find, copying large amounds of […]