Just put the feed in tonight! Just need to adjust the focus and hammer out some stuff in the parabolic curve, and its ready to go, for testing anyway. The nice thing about using TV antennas is the fact that I can test the antenna on TV stations nearby to the RA band (Channel 37) to see what kind of reception I can get and (roughly) test the -3dB beamwidth(s) before I assess the performance on cosmic sources.
On a darker note, I just received and replied back and forth to a fellow by the name of Joel Gonzalez, saying that he has been problems with the receiver kit I am going to be using,
http://www.mtmscientific.com/tuner.html
regarding the IF output of the tuner. Before anybody who bought this begins to chew their fingers raw, I'm gonna build the thing. Hopefully Joel is having a localized problem with the board or something and not the tuner itself, or if is the tuner, maybe a bad batch. However Mr. Gonzalez has pointed out that you can also use the AFT pin (basically an S-meter voltage) to perform total power measurements. However for my purposes, I need the IF for further downconversion to a narrowband receiver, for when I have an L-band converter block at the front end (spectral line measurements), and for SETI. Tsk tsk, eek... :P
Anyway, I will post pics of the feed in the morning, as its about one o'clock in the morning at the time of this writing.
Cheers,
KM
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
First post... and an announcement!
Hello all, just posting to the new blog, making sure it works, and...
Oh yes, I have bought the parts for the radio telescope feed! It consists of four simple TV antennas some coax and a four-way splitter! Ain't working on an astronomy band in the UHF TV band great (channel 37, 608-614 MHz)? As for as the 1420 MHz hydrogen line feed goes, I will have to roll my own, probably a collinear array of folded dipole/rod reflectors. I am also going to make one of these for 608-614 MHz, as the feed I'm building now constitutes a lot of blockage for an aperture a little over two wavelengths wide (that doesn't figure in diffraction either) ;) Anyway, I will build the feed and hope for the best, I really don't have much of a way to test it, besides the sun (though a fellow from Norway, Jan Lustrup, is giving me a noise source and attenuator, so I can do some more controlled measurements). Anyway, as soon as the TV antennas get here I'll post here ASAP.
Cheers, KM.
Oh yes, I have bought the parts for the radio telescope feed! It consists of four simple TV antennas some coax and a four-way splitter! Ain't working on an astronomy band in the UHF TV band great (channel 37, 608-614 MHz)? As for as the 1420 MHz hydrogen line feed goes, I will have to roll my own, probably a collinear array of folded dipole/rod reflectors. I am also going to make one of these for 608-614 MHz, as the feed I'm building now constitutes a lot of blockage for an aperture a little over two wavelengths wide (that doesn't figure in diffraction either) ;) Anyway, I will build the feed and hope for the best, I really don't have much of a way to test it, besides the sun (though a fellow from Norway, Jan Lustrup, is giving me a noise source and attenuator, so I can do some more controlled measurements). Anyway, as soon as the TV antennas get here I'll post here ASAP.
Cheers, KM.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
