[Malewithatail (Dick)]

My interest in radio astronomy dates from high school. Whilst all the other boys were making garden forks and other bits n pieces in metal work, I was making yagi aerials that operated at 220 MHz. Taking them home in pieces in my school bag. I'm sure the teacher had no idea what I was doing, and as I kept to myself, he had bigger issues to look after. I eventually made 4 off, 24 element yagis out of what was then 3/4 inch flat bar, with folded dipoles and a phasing harness. Two in series, with 2 in parallel, giving the required 300 ohm feed-line impedance as the set required. 75 ohm impedance's were not yet common place.

My receiver was a highly modified old Pye tv set, chosen from the scrap heap as it had 5 intermediate frequency amplification stages and was a super fringe set. I re-tuned the IF strip for maximum audio gain as the video output was of no concern.

I mounted the aerials of broom handles, lined up using a long piece of timber and swept the setup across the sky.

My first hearing of the suns noise hooked me for life.

I graduated to a 3 meter aluminum dish, which I transported home on the roof of my old truck, on bits of timber, yes 3 meters wide on the road !! Then came F to D ratios and other stuff.

After cascaded valve rf amplifiers came gasfets, supposed to be the cats whiskers of amps, but oh so noisy, then cmos devices, darlintons, and experiments with cryogenic cooling of cascaded j-fets using liquid nitrogen obtained from the lab at work.

Whilst still at school, I became involved with the Ilawarra Amateur Radio club and the moon-bounce project at Dapto, led by Lyle Patterson. I can still hear the echos of our own signals from the moons surface. We had a high power permit to run 1 kilowatt on the 433 MHz ham band. Now hams do Venus and Mars bounce, such is the technology available nearly off the shelf now.

Somewhere I still have some of the gear Id collected to do this, but the technology has outpaced hi powered tetrode valves, klystrons, Traveling wave tubes and the like now. All museum pieces, rather like myself !!


Looking into the infinite makes you realize just how small we actually are.



Surprising results are possible even with old Austar dishes and analogue set top boxes, slightly modified to receive ssb with an external BFO.


'nuff for now.


Dick