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 […]
As you probably do not know, I’m currently trying to build a semi-digital radio interferometer at 408MHz, for astronomy. I played around a bit with patch antennas, and did some very basic “interferometry” tests with them. Some extremely bad tinfoil patch antennas being used for “interferometry” Basic idea of how this interferometer could work The plan for this telescope goes something like this: There’s an arbitrary number of antennas (the […]
I’m planning to build another radio telescope (I’ll write more about that once it’s a bit more advanved), and for that, I need to solder a lot of SMD stuff — mostly because many of the parts I need are only available in SMD. This has a few advantages — especially it’s cheaper and smaller — but it can also be very difficult to do with a soldering iron, for […]