When you think of a radio telescope, you usually think of a giant dish antenna pointing skyward. But [vhuvanmakes] built Wavy-Scope, a handheld radio telescope that can find the Sun and the Moon, among other things. The build is relatively straightforward, using a commercial LNB to detect signals in the 10-12 GHz range. The detector […]
As you might expect, the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has a fascination with radio signals from space. While doing research into the legendary “Wow! Signal” detected back in 1977, they realized that the burst was so strong that a small DIY radio telescope would be able to pick it up using modern software-defined […]
The moon is a popular target for ham radio operators to bounce signals since it’s fairly large and follows a predictable path. There are some downsides, though; it’s not always visible from the same point on Earth and is a relatively long way away. Thinking they could trade some distance for size, an amateur radio […]
What do you get when you put a one-meter parabolic dish, an SDR, a Raspberry Pi, and an H1-LNA for 21 cm emissions together? The answer is: a radio telescope that can track hydrogen in the Milky Way as well as the velocities of hydrogen clouds via their Doppler shifts, according to a paper by […]
[David Schneider] asked himself, “How big a radio antenna would you need to observe anything interesting?” The answer turns out to be a $150 build of a half meter antenna. He uses it to detect the motions of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The first attempt was a satellite TV dish and a […]
You probably wouldn’t expect to see somebody making astronomical observations during a cloudy day in the center of a dense urban area, but that’s exactly what was happening at the recent 2019 Philadelphia Mini Maker Faire. Professor James Aguirre of the University of Pennsylvania was there demonstrating the particularly compact Mini Radio Telescope (MRT) project […]