Hi Francesco & Jason,
I am currently outside with the dawn chorus (bird song at dawn), as the Milky Way is (sort of) overhead at this time of the day. I don’t normally get up at this time to do astronomy – usually dreaming away in bed – but sometimes sacrifices are needed for our hobby!
I have just spent last 30-45 minutes testing the new LRO-H5 radio telescope – 140cm communications dish with Discovery hydrogen line feed.
Firstly, it was not working at all, just like it was with the solar cooker dish – I then discovered that the computer it was on said that the SDR was connected even when it wasn’t! That does not make sense and suggests a major problem with that system, so I changed to another mini-PC and “Voila!” Hydrogen peak immediately appeared. [As I was using that computer for the solar cooker dish this suggests the computer might have been the problem there – either way, my wife prefers this dish and feed when she looks out of the window to the solar cooker one.]
The wonderful thing about the Discovery feed is that it is so easy to adjust the focal position just by pulling the stalk up and down – no fiddly adjustments – I could do that whilst looking at computer screen to find best point. The screenshot below is from best focus point.
Jason – what would you say was the gain on this?
Andy
