Making A Radio Telescope

[badgerchap]

Well I disappeared for 6 months and I've come back and Jamespels, you seem to be getting well involved. Great stuff!

[kimmerrild]

I have seen a few things about old satellite dishes, but they're only really sufficient for detecting large apparent diameter objects like the moon and Jupiter and the Sun.

This got me thinking, and if we have a programmer in the house it might help the thinking process along:

Same as the problem faced by governments really, but on a smaller scale, constructing a massive dish is beyond the means of most of us. However, what about some VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry)?

If a number of us were to purchase 3 or 4 satellite dishes each, would we then be able to link them up via the tinterwebs and create a virtual dish with an effective dish size correspondent to the largest separation between the dishes? When not hooked up, 4 dishes would make a bit of backyard fun, but all linked together, we could have our very own, full sized SGL Radio Telescope.

It would be a bit of a challenge to firstly get the individual dishes set up and working, and even more of a struggle to get the virtual dish going, but surely it can be done?

If people would be interested, I'm sure I could approach the department at uni and get some professional help? I know one of my lecturers does RA, so I'm sure he'd be willing to give some guidance?

Just a thought, anyway. Maybe I'll set up a new thread, if I get any interest....?

Not possible - the data beeing produced is so imensly vast that eventho we have a 100mbit fiber to the inet, still to slow.

http://www.lofar.org/about-lofar/about-lofar

The setup wouldent be like this, I know........

Well, it's doable, but only with a few freq'ies I guess, the data produced is vast - Would be cool thow. If anyone ever created a thing like this, I would like to serve as a node in the network. I have space, interrest and semi knowledge to set it up.

The local radio community would deffently helt in a setup like this

[Dave_D]

When i was working at Jodrell Bank i got to have a mooch round the tech labs... you should see the size of the cryo unit they use on the Mk II dish detector

Was so tempted to stick my tongue on it to see if it stuck

[Gina]