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I too have been collecting the stuff to set something up, somewhere I have a professional super high frequency receiver that has a very low, for a 20 year old piece of gear, noise figure. Add a decent lnb and a 1 meter dish, and we could certainly tune into the cosmic background and other sources. Only 1 thing missing, well 2 actually, the usual time and of course money......
When I was at school, I designed and constructed a 4 bay, I think, stacked Yagi aerial system with 4 or could of been 6, 30 element Yagi's tuned to 220 megs I think. A homemade feed match, gamma type, was made to combine the aerials and by using the channel 10 Sydney tv station, I plotted the pattern of the array and fine tuned the individual aerials. Once again, I used an old (Valve tv sets were being scrapped all the time as solid state and color was coming in), tv set, another Pye, as they were fringe area sets and had 5 If stages, which originally were stagger tuned to give a wide bandwidth needed for the video signal. I retuned them to be narrow band, obviously totally destroying any chance of video reception, but improving the noise figure and sensitivity. I borrowed a Honeywell analogue chart recorder from the Wollongong TAFE college, or maybe the Wollongong Uni as my Dad worked there, and ran some charts of firstly thermal noise (for calibration), then some noise from the sun and other stars. I was a big thrill to pan the array, manually as I didn't have any money for motor driven stuff, and watch the pen move up the chart. Also, the automatic gain control in the tv chassis had to be disconnected as it tried to smooth out the response and I wanted a raw data set.
There used to be a astronomy club called the "Illawarra Astronomical Society" and it met in Boyong street, about 20 mins walk from home and I joined it when I was about 12 or so. I remember they built from scratch a 24 inch Newtonian telescope, but no one was interested in radio astronomy.
Will talk about a radio telescope when I see you mate.
Help, I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe !
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