Recent content by Baluncore

During wartime, patents were selectively classified as secret, and not published, to prevent the enemy from gaining the information.

Given the RA, Dec of a source, a fixed EW array of two or more elements could be constructed with that declination. That array would observe the source for some period each day, as it was swept by the beam width of the elements. Deconvoluting the combined signal, by the array pattern, would give...

It is good that you are now recognising that the receiver front-end needs to be at the focus. I agree that if you pull back your expectations sufficiently, then you may achieve your objective, within your budget. I would question whether the objective is worth the investment, or maybe you are...

If the fluid is pure water, then the capillaries that wick the liquid water back to the hot end, will need to survive ice wedging when freezing, and the enclosure will also need to be chemically non-reactive with water. In heat pipes that are exposed to freezing conditions, propylene glycol, or...

It does not have to use cryogenic cooling, a stack of Peltier refrigeration modules will do the job at the focus of an amateur RA observatory. The aim is to maximise signal to noise. There is little available S/N gap without expending effort. In effect, you must wedge open the S/N, to make...

I warn the neophytes of how steep the learning curve really is. It may seem easy to engineer an amateur RA observatory, for some particular project. Actually implementing the design is a bigger, and somewhat more difficult task. It is rare to find one person with all the skills needed, and...

I maintained and operated a radio astronomy observatory before I retired.

By virtue of the cosmic noise it receives, every receiver that is connected to an antenna, is doing some radio astronomy. The band from 1400 MHz to 1427 MHz is reserved for passive hydrogen line radio astronomy, above that are 4G and 5G mobile phones, but across everything is RFI as...

There were one or more tricks involved in the 100 mpg demonstration with that big V8. Maybe the wind direction changed midday, so there was a negative air resistance each way. Maybe the tires were inflated to 100 psi. 100 mpg is more easily done outside the USA, because imperial gallons (4.546...

My guess is that the engine employed a gas mixer, like on an LPG fuelled vehicle, but produced the gas by boiling high octane gasoline. It is just possible, that it was economic, but with such poor performance, it would be a hazard on the road. Maybe, isolating half the cylinders was employed to...

You are free to select your transform size. For one project, I was monitoring the background noise floor across the HF band from 1 MHz to 30 MHz. I needed to look between the transmitters, which required narrow bins. There was some pulse noise, so I also kept score in a counterintuitive way, by...

I think the mud is probably marine, originally volcanic ash, washed into the sea. That mud will probably be more conductive than the local solid rock layers that cap the mud formations. I think the layer of conductive mud on the surface, will screen or hide what is happening below from your...

If you get serious about doing home RA, you will build your own two channel receiver, from FET based LNAs, with matched band-pass filters to remove the nearby and adjacent channel interference. Once sufficient gain has been applied, you can down convert the signal to an IF or baseband. By using...

Welcome to PF. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidoarjo_mud_flow There may be someone here who knows the answer, but this question is probably better answered by a search of geophysical survey journals. https://www.agiusa.com/dipole-dipole%E2%80%8B-%E2%80%8Barray%E2%80%8B Since the mud-volcano...

Ferranti was only hired to design the first. Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti was hired by the London Electric Supply Corporation, to design the Deptford power station. It was a success, and set the standard as the first high voltage AC station, that used transformers to step down the AC voltage for...