Hi all! I have been reading about radio astronomy and started wondering for a different use of the KrakenRF - radio telescope. Hear me out - the frequency range capabilities of the Kraken are well within the ranges that are interesting to astronomers (70-300MHz). What if I attach some weird antennae with some directionality and point them to the sky? There’s this project in Australia called the Murchison Widefield Aray. They basically make grids of 16 antennae elements and do electronic beamforming and steering. The Kraken is perfect for such a use. Maybe I am being too naive, but imagine a grid of (let’s say) 16 Krakens, each with 5 antennae similar to the MWA, combined to a single server for signal processing. That’s going to be a grid with 80 points at a fraction of the cost of what the MWA probably costs…
Anyone any thoughts? Any takers to help me make such a project a reality?
It should be possible to do 1420 MHz h-line interferometry with Kraken’s. I recall someone on the SARA forums (https://groups.google.com/g/sara-list) was trying this in the past, but I have not heard further. In theory, you could have up to 5 antennas in an interferometer with the Kraken.
Accuracy of antenna placement, alignment and knowledge of the beamwidth of your antenna is probably key. As well as ensuring your coax runs are phase matched.
For 70-300 MHz I’m not sure what you’d be doing. Remember you can only beamform within the beamwidth of your physical antennas. And if you use wide beamwidth antennas they would pick up man-made signals and noise. So it’s a challenge.
Thanks for the reply! The idea for looking at the hydrogen line is actually not a bad one. I thought that since it’s slightly outside of the spec of the radio, it wouldn’t work. As for my choice of 70-300, I’d be looking at pulsars, sunspots, jovian emissions and the general cosmic background.
For the antennae placement and tuning, yes that would be a challenge at such ‘low’ frequencies as opposed to 1.4GHz, but if I take my time, I think it’s doable.
Thanks for the link to the group! I will check it out later and if I have some progress and anyone is interested, I will post back here.