Track Movement of Milky Way With Amateur Radio Telescope

Well done WØPV, thanks for finding that link.

QST ran an article 10 years ago, still good reading:

"Build a Homebrew Radio Telescope" WA8SME shares his experience.
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/ETP/Radio Telescope.pdf

Search on "Amateur Radio telescope" will bring lots of interesting reading.

 

Best article on QRZ in memory
Like see more of these kind of stories very inspiring indeed
Best 73
Joe
W0IW

 

It would be interesting if he developed a tracking system for the paint can horn antenna. Since the antenna is fairly small and lightweight, one could probably repurpose the mount of a hobbyist "go-to" optical telescope.

 

It all depends on the size of your antenna. I use a yagis for my RA work, and have one of them mounted on a Skyview Pro Equatorial Mount with a clock drive. I can set it up at dusk, and trust it to track all night if I want it to.

For RA work, you can use a GOTO mount.... but you don't really need one. They can be quite expensive. Any good equatorial mount with a single axis clock drive will do the trick. The Beam Width of most antennas is wide enough that you can manually set the initial position and then let the clock drive do it's thing. A small horn of plenty would work well on such a mount, as would a Log Periodic.

 

they are....

 

The charm of this system is that it uses OTS RX (an SDR dongle is now usable), and an easy to fab antenna. FAR less work than previous systems!

Then again, it is quite limited in 'what it can do'. Given that, the effort to 'what it can do' ratio is very reasonable.

 

you might want to look at the new SDRplay RSP2 Pro. I used an R-7100 for a number of years before switching over. The SDR is quieter, and has a lot less coaxial loss than the R-7100 since it can be mounted right on the yagi-boom, and thus the entire system is cleaner.

 

Here is a pic of my "portable" RA Telescope system. My bigger one is just the same, except it's on an Equatorial Mount. I posted a write-up on it in the Space Radio section of the forum.

 

I believe that is the very best receiver for under $US 30,000 or so.
To do that on the cheap is just great. I wonder how effective it
would be to build one for satellite use. Hmmm. Thanks for the
incentive, John. Many 73 from RI.
I can be reached anytime via Hamshackhotline.com, my extension
number is 4094.

 

You dont have to spend that much. LNA's can be cooled and that will beat down the noise big time. Even for amateurs.

The number one rule is never, ever look at the ground with the receiver on. Too hot--burn out front end or at least saturate it....