The feed is in and... pictures!

I attempted to load these on my website, but I can't login for some odd reason so... here they are:


As you can see, a lot of blockage, but I did a short test with an old TV set and, lets put it this way, I got channels I have never seen in this area (I think one was from Tucson, and it came in full color and almost completely clear!) right through the my garden gate! The directivity seems to be what I expected, and I was able to aim it over the fence and pick up even more signal and it faded to static after a very slight tip in either direction (elevation). It is also more directive in azimuth then elevation (faded in and out with a little shake right and left), which was also expected. The front-to-back ratio is phenomenal, I couldn't get anything out the back (turned it away from the gate completely). Anyway, a real test will have to wait until the receiver is built and I get Jan's noise source. Here are more pics:

The feed.


The parabolic curve of the cylinder.

Close up of the feed, showing the TV splitter used a the combiner for phasing the elements in the line feed together.

Well, that's it for now, the next steps to take are building a meridian transit (drift scan) mount, building the receiver, and of course, testing it. Future plans are a tracking system involving beam shaping the elements by using phase shifters, and then making the telescope remotely controllable over an http interface (I'm learning Java for that purpose now) and doing a collaborative study with those who would like time on the telescope over an IRC channel on the freenode IRC network (I currently run that channel for general discussion purposes, #radioastronomy on irc.freenode.net port 6667).

All this having been said, you can visit my website,

http://channel37.110mb.com/

to find a list of places to contact me with questions, suggestions, etc. other than comments posted to this blog.

Cheers,

KM