While a satellite dish looks like a radio telescope it is not the only way to go about observing in radio frequencies. A radio tuned off station produces a hiss and that is my starting point for the next project.
I used an old mobile phone with an FM radio app installed as my radio reciever. This was connected via the mic in port on a little notebook I use for physics stuff. The software used was Radio-SkyPipe This records the amplitude of the signal at a slow sample rate so you can record for days without filling the hard drive. That's it cost me nothing in new stuff and used only things I had lying around. I have plenty of other FM radios if I think that the mobile phone is not suitable for the job.
I set the radio to 89.3MHz this is the frequency of radio Belfast and is not received in Edinburgh. Listening through headphones all that is heard is a very monotonous hiss. A disturbance in the ionosphere such as a meteor striking the upper atmosphere or a solar storm can cause the radio waves from the transmitter to be reflected off the ionised gas and received by my radio.
I picked a quiet night to test the set up. There were no solar storms and no meteor showers forecast. This would give me a good baseline to use as a comparison. As expected I got very little variation in the hiss but at first look I saw some spikes in the trace. This got me excited until I saw that they were quite evenly spaced. Every 1 hour 2 minutes something in my setup causes a small spike 20% above the hiss. This is good to know so it can be ignored when if I get some proper signals.
If anyone has successfully got results with a setup like this I would welcome some advice. I will post any interesting results I get from this project.
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