Has anyone built a radio telescope using Software Defined Radio.

[Siliconaut]

A neighbor of mine got evicted a few months back and left behind a satellite dish. I talked to the landlord and told him I was going to appropriate it for science and build a radio telescope out of it and place it on a pole in the side yard next to my building where all the sat dishes are lined up. Then I just link the telescopes coax line to the apartments cable splice,since I don't have cable or satellite and plug it into the next stage in the loop.

Anyway, the goal of the project is to have a functioning and portable rad telescope to set up for the total solar Eclipse taking place a hundred miles south of me in 2017. The radio telescope will still take readings from the Eclipse even under cloud cover. I may be one of the only radio telescopes for hundreds of miles to record the Eclipse.

Anyway, has anyone here set one up using Software Defined Radio dangle? This dish is too small to be a very good rad scope but it's just a first project before I build a larger 1 or even 2 meter telescope over the next 2 years. I've read some pretty awesome results though from these home brew dishes and a radio telescope recording of a total solar Eclipse will be extremely useful scientifically. On the other hand these small dishes are so ubiquitous that I could probably set up a radio interferometry array and with 2 smaller dishes and get good resolution VA a single large dish.

 

[Urwumpe]

My old analog black&white TV set that I used to have as kid actually worked fine as radio telescope... at least you had been able to locate the background radiation with it.