A small walkthrough of my hydrogen line radio telescope, seen through an app which does a really cool AR overlay of the Milkyway.

What happens when I point the antenna to a vertical position, far away from the galaxy?
To things: 1) the 1420MHz signal disappears and 2) The noise floor drops several dB. Effectively this means at I’m picking up ground noise at this low view angle 👌🏻

#radiotelescope #astronomy #radioastronomy #rfengineer #rfengineering #hamradio #hamr #siglent #frequencyfriday

10 years back, I started experimenting, building my own radio telescope. My results, trying to observe the Galaxy hydrogen line at 1420MHz, were positive but in no way impressive.

Years have passed, I have better test equipment today, I have my own lab and I have a better antenna 🤓 📡

So I decided to give it a go last night - and it worked!

Not ideal a summer evening like this, the sky temperature is too high, and my observing angle too low, but at least I proved it possible, it’s a nice starting point 🙂🙂

My setup is a vintage 17dBi standard gain horn and a 38dB LNA, cooled about 20degrees below ambient. I feed this to my spectrum analyzer.

Next step will be to build a larger antenna and try again with when everything cools down in the fall 🙂

I really looked forward to share this - I hope you appreciate it 👌🏻☺️

#radiotelescope #astronomy #radioastronomy #rfengineer #rfengineering #hamradio #hamr #siglent #frequencyfriday

Inspired by a Twitter dialogue, let’s launch some daily #electronics tags to be used freely 👍🏼🤓

Today is #waveformwednesday and here’s how my mains grid looks - not quite a sine but that’s to be expected.

Don’t ever, EVER, connect your scope input directly to mains - use a high voltage differential probe or a transformer, as shown here.

I’m using the #quicktest switch, it’s a really handy way to control power to a circuit. It’s of British origin and comes with a standard 13A BS1362 fuse. I found that a bit high for my purposes, so I replaced it with a 5A, significantly limiting the available energy in case of a fault situation. Safety first always applies at the bench 👍🏼⚡️☝🏻

So go ahead, use these tags freely, be inspired and show us your experiments 👌🏻🙂

#electronics #rohdeschwarz #micsig #electronicsengineering #engineer #hamradio #measurementmonday #testgeartuesday #waveformwednesday #teardownthursday #frequencyfriday #signalsaturday #sensorsunday

It's a #FrequencyFriday. Here's where to listen for the #ISS on #HamRadio as it passes overhead.

Check status of radios at https://www.ariss.org/current-status-of-iss-stations.html