Designing a scanning radio telescope... Too much effort/impossible?

[pipnina]

Hello, I've been interested in building a radio telescope for a while but I have no idea on how to design one, what complications could arise, how expensive it would be or if it's even possible!

I have a (relatively) spatious back garden that looks out to the north of plymouth (although it's facing downhill so most of the south is inaccessible (unless radio waves go through my house??? I think they do) But it's not aptious enough to have a permanent 2.4 metre radio dish so here are my requisites:

    It has to be collapsable,

    It has to be stationary (permanantly in the ground, not taking it anywhere afterall)

    It needs to be motorised (and preferably be able to scan across DSOs)

    I need to be able to make an image out of it at the end- preferably a greyscale in specific frequencies

    Be controlled via WiFi (select targets using planetariam software and get it to do a vertical and horisontal scan?)

Is this project too ambitious? I understand that the mount, electrical equipment and software side of things will be more complicated than building the dish itself (probably). And will it cost an 'astronomical'   ammount?

(p.s. the dish doesn't have to be 2.4 metres, that was just an example)

Ta!

    ~pip

[Gina]

Sounds pretty ambitious to me   Good luck

[soundwave]

I think that the most feasible way that you could do it is to go the route of MIT's Omniscope.

It's basically a bunch of small antennas spread around, sending their data to a software that makes sense of it. Of course, it'm sure it's much more complicated than that

• http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/main_omniscope.html (resources at the bottom)
• http://www.mit.edu/~acliu/thesis_proposal.pdf (design idea)

[Cath]

You'll be hard pushed to be able to construct a dish big enough and accurate enough to be able to discern much of a difference between one side of a DSO and the other. The beam width of the dish is dependent upon the diameter to frequency ratio - the lower your frequency the broader the beam width will be.

What kind of frequencies are you interested in ?