Radio astronomy

[I.C.D (Ian)]

G,Day All,
I have been doing a bit of reading on the net about radio astronomy .What do I need to do if I wanted to get into this side of astronomy
Ian

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

High the cheapest starting option is HF Radio JOVE project which is the simplest and cheapest of all of them.

As a matter of fact I was going to sell my JOVE stuff to make way for Molecular Hydrogen Hydrogen detection which is a bit more complicated.

I still need to place my stuff in a metal box.

The above are the 2 most common projects, they get a bit more complicated and expensive after the above two.

[I.C.D (Ian)]

G'Day, Malcolm
Thanks for the reply I knew nothing about the Jove project I have been reading about it and how it works ,the article I have been reading about where they use an old foxtel dish with a LND and sat-finder with sound ,do you know anything about this type of radio astronomy
Ian

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

I have heard something but only brief. not sure about it. I have been mainly concentrating on 1.4GHz molecular Hydrogen mostly along with my astro photography.

I think they may be for satellite finding not so much radio astronomy. There is a slight difference. Satellite observing can easily be done with the foxtel dish and an SDR which are really cheap.

There are many other frequencies that can be measured but I though Hydrogen is the most abundant and worth a look in

[Astrogeo (Tony)]

Howdy Ian and Malcolm. I've been experimenting with radio over the last few months. As always, the type of rig is pretty dependent on what you want to look at. The targets I considered myself were the Sun, Jupiter and other deeper sky targets like galactic core etc. Cutting a long story short I went with solar observation, but the basics can be adapted to other sources as well.

I am scanning the RF spectrum from 25-88MHz looking for artifacts from solar events. So the rig is essentially a "Solar Radio Spectroscope". It consists of a wideband discone antenna, antenna amp (can use a satellite finder which has an amp built in and just has a signal strength meter on the front). Then USB TV dongle and software (aka Software Defined Radio - SDR). There's more info in the link above, which is on my blog. I've also added another post with more technical specs here.

The whole lot cost me less than $200 and is giving me plenty of data to play with, even with a very quiet sun. Happy to elaborate if you want to know more...

Tony