Hi Jim, jimlux wrote: > This, and similar impressive accomplishments, has prompted some > lunchtime discussion at work (JPL).. One of us (N5BF) has been > contemplating what it would take to do an amateur EarthVenusEarth (after > some of his experiments doing EME with 5 watts)..
Has recently been done by German amateurs in Bochum: http://www.southgatearc.org/news/march2009/eve.htm We've done Moonbounce with 3mW (Hobart - Dwingeloo) in JT65 - but a 26m and a 25m dish is stretching 'amateur' a bit again. > So, when talking about "amateur" accomplishments.. where do you draw the > line on using "big stuff". If you're an amateur who happens to have > access to Arecibo or to a DSN 70m dish, is that *really* an amateur > contact/event? For Camras, I do now have to point out that the dish had been unused for 13 years, and apart from the construction itself, nothing was really in a serviceable state anymore. This means that we installed new engines and the hardware/software to drive them, gearbox modifications, new antennas, preamps, receivers, backends, pulsar-processing, computing, networking and much more. It's not as if we were handed the key to a working telescope - in fact, the first work was mucking out the dirt and dead animals that had gathered inside... > So, when talking about "amateur" accomplishments.. where do you draw > the line on using "big stuff". "Singlehandedly" is a poor discriminator, as doing things like this in a group is great fun, "Fabrication" seems more relevant - but in the end, what's really the point of drawing such an arbitrary line, as long as we're having a great time and accomplish things? The great equalizer here is simply the ongoing rapid technological progress. Hobby-prized access to fun toys like Rubidiums (does anyone have an H-maser to spare though? ;-), FPGAs and fast A/D converters make things possible for amateurs nowadays that were out of reach for professionals just a decade ago. Working on a dish that is more than 50 years old really puts this in perspective, and we as amateurs have already improved its performance in some aspects beyond what it could do in its 'professional' life (thanks of course to this 13 year gap). Regards, Paul Boven. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.