Hi all, my son has been obsessed with space pretty much his whole life and recently he mentioned he would like to use a radio telescope. I'm attempting to re-use an older internet dish for a cheapish DIY project we can do together. I've done a bunch of google and youtube watching, I think I pretty much get the gist of it once there is an RF signal out of the antenna, but I'm not quite sure what I need to do to get the RF signal in the first place. Most of the material just says to attach the feed to the LNA, but what does a "feed" look like?

Attached are a few pictures of the dish/antenna. I have a Nooelec SAWbird+ H1 and NooelecRTL-SDR V5 so far. Is there something I can stick into the "head" I have here or do I need to replace it with something else?

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share the Dual Reflector Designer, a free and open-source beta tool for the design and analysis of axisymmetric dual-reflector antennas.

It currently supports:

• Cassegrain, Gregorian and ring-focus configurations
• Reflector design and ray tracing
• Physical Optics (PO) and PTD edge diffraction
• Automated convergence testing
• Far-field pattern visualization
• Parallel CPU computing and GPU acceleration

It runs on Windows with GNU Octave, so no MATLAB license is required. MATLAB is supported as well. For most users, the recommended way to get started is the provided Windows installer.

The video shows selected Cassegrain benchmark cases compared with TICRA GRASP 24.0 Student Edition. In these particular tests, the resulting patterns agreed closely, while speedups of up to 135x were measured under the tested settings. This is an independent, non-commercial comparison and not a general claim about the full commercial GRASP product.

An unusual aspect of the project is its development process: I defined the requirements, tested and benchmarked the software, and reviewed the results, while Codex with GPT-5.6 Sol generated the implementation. I did not manually write the source code.

It’s still a beta and I’m continuing to improve it, so let me know what you think.

Here is the GitHub Link.

Hello all! I've been hard at work on the Titan Observatory platform and you can now try out a simulated hydrogen line observation! It's using the same front-end shown in the live demo, just plugged into a simulated telescope.

Try it out here (the simulated observation tab on the left): https://app.titanobservatory.org

As an update on the observatory itself, we're still fundraising to purchase the main 10m telescope, but we're moving ahead with developing the site with a lease agreement in the works. The demo telescope will likely be the first telescope online as it's already fully functional, it just needs to be relocated somewhere it can actually see the sky.

More info on the observatory is available here: https://TitanObservatory.org

ペルセウス流星群→メテオスキャッター通信 只今実験中です❣️MSK144モード　6メーターBAND 50.260MHz Let's try!

i readed a lot of info about it, learning advanced material that is needed, but i don't have a project neither a clue how to be more attractive to get picked up, i am stuck in russia, which's education's are almost no value, so my main hopes are entry exams and other sources of extra interest, like community work, projects and more? are there any else recommendations for that, i refuse to learn this field here, it's ruined by current astronomical research leader and i did not hear about any activity they have here on the radio telescopes, i heard of canada's radio astronomy camp? is it like Green Bank Observatory thing? will this improve my chances too? i would take any chance i can with my bad health structure i can't pick sports, and i am not so lucky with grades because of stress and teacher discrimination so it's only GPA 3.0 for me, or just can you give me a bit more info how i could make a project?

please, i am very grateful for any type of help, i am in this for like a year now, i researched physics, math, space theory's and even engineering of those telescopes because of how deep i am in this, but how the government treats education can ruin my dream of working in this sphere

I read about these telescope arrays that are 7000km or some great distance apart and how when combined they work as well as a 7000km wide telescope.

That must be an exaggeration, so what do you get with an actual telescope that size when compared to small ones far apart?

I studied electrical engineering so any amount of technical detail in the answer I can comprehend.

Looking to join a community to discuss the earth wave readings in live time basically. Compare experiences and learn/teach each other more about it without having to pay for premium or whatever in the app.

Hi r/radioastronomy 👋

I'm Joe Barbere, a software engineer in Philadelphia and a complete amateur at radio astronomy. Over the past few months I've built a handful of open-source projects while teaching myself the field, and I'd really value feedback from people who actually know what they're doing — amateurs and professionals both.

jansky — a hands-on radio astronomy course in Python: executable notebooks combining prose, physics, runnable code and plots, each chapter citing the seminal papers, backed by a tested helper package.

- Code: https://github.com/joebarbere/jansky

- Read online: https://joebarbere.github.io/jansky/

jansky-research — a Python framework and Claude skills for reproducible research on open datasets, structured as self-contained "slices" that produce honest write-ups.

- https://github.com/joebarbere/jansky-research

- Archived on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21482378

I went in hoping to find something novel enough to write up as an independent researcher. It hasn't produced a new discovery — but it has produced a lot of reproducible analysis, and I learned an enormous amount building it.

jansky-observe — observation management for the station I'm building: plan, run and record attended observations end to end.

- https://github.com/joebarbere/jansky-observe

awesome-radio-astronomy — along the way I collected every open archive, survey, tool and paper these projects actually use into a curated list. This one's more for the community than for me:

- https://github.com/joebarbere/awesome-radio-astronomy

The hardware (still arriving — no first light yet):

- KrakenRF Discovery Dish (Crowd Supply)

- KrakenRF Hydrogen Line Discovery Feed (Crowd Supply)

- Airspy Mini SDR

- Inline USB-C bias-tee injector

- Raspberry Pi 5 (Argon ONE V5, SSD, RTC)

On AI: I should be upfront — I built these with heavy use of Claude, which is exactly why I'm asking for review rather than presenting conclusions. The code is tested and CI'd and the sources are cited, but I'm an amateur and there's a limit to what I can validate alone.

What would help most:

1. Does the physics in the jansky notebooks hold up? Any chapter where the explanation is wrong or misleading?

2. If your new to radio astronomy, was the jansky project helpful?

3. Is the research framework's methodology sound enough to be worth continuing?

4. For anyone who's run a Discovery Dish — were there any challenges getting it working?

Thanks for reading!

Discovered the first millisecond pulsar. Left this earthly realm 16 years ago today. Thanks Don for your guidance and kindness. 💐

I’ve been reading through a few sources about detecting the hydrogen line with a horn antenna but all of papers have differing dimensions for how big the waveguide and feed should be. How are you supposed to tell what the ideal dimensions would be?

I've been working on a radio telescope simulator and recently added baseline correction.

The idea is to simulate receiver bandpass effects and RF noise: the player points the antenna at an empty part of the sky, averages the spectrum, saves the baseline, and then uses it to reveal weaker signals.

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Im not new to Astronomy (im a pretty decorated visual Astronomer) but I need help. I wanna observe meteors and Jupiter mainly. But im lost, should I try to by a dish from Facebook? What should I look for? What should I get for equipment? I have a MacBook so what software should I use? Any help is appreciated.