Hi Eric
good question
I hope I can help answer your question....
First off yes Jupiter is noisy .... and quite easily detectable from the earth.
To listen to Jupiter your going to need some basic items, sadly they are not quite what you would have hanging round the garage .. but you may have some if your even slightly interested in radio monitoring of other things.
Firstly Jupiter emits radio waves from around 40 MHz down to a few KHz
One of the best areas to listen is around 15 - 25 MHz as at this frequency range the ionsphere will give you less problems.
For a receiver you will need a radio that will either do AM or with a product detector ... usually this means the radio will receive single sideband or CW. A lot of these smaller broadcast radios sold as worldband receivers usually have these frequency ranges on them. Alternative ebay will certainly provide a cheap shortwave receiver.
The receiver shhould have an ext antenna socket as you will need more than that small whip antenna that comes with it.
But the garage will provide some wire im sure for an antenna.
If you feel like doing some experiments you can also purchase kits for building a radio too.
Antennas are usually wire dipoles .. that means two lengths of around around 12-15 ft long of thin wire. One of these connects to the centre conductor and the other to the outside of some cheap CB coax cable or even SATTV cable .. it does not really matter too much.
This plugs into the the receiver and gets strung out outside around 5-10 about the ground. Its not really too important!
So now you have a receiver and antenna you need your radio source!
As the position of jupiter is changing only certain times will you be able to receive the radio storms.
There are quite a few locations on the internet and even some natty software available to do predictions.
Radio Sky are rather a good place to find such tools and their Radio Jupiter 3 software can be downloaded for free on 30day trial and isnt really expensive bu there are plenty of prediction sites online too .
you can find prediction tables also on the JOVE project pages too and the Japan Jupiter Radio Observatory pages
in this way you can find when jupiter is above the horizon in your location and then attempt to receive it
what your listening for can sound like waves, or clicks like a woodpecker
best to have a listen to some of the samples on the sites so you know what to listen for!
So maybe you can kick things off by letting me know what you have ordont have in terms of a receiver
kind regards
Simon
