Got an Old Satellite Dish? – Convert it to Your Own Radio Telescope

July 24, 2014

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July 24, 2014 – When my wife and I downsized we left our satellite dish and satellite TV behind and went back to cable because that’s what was available in the building where we have our apartment. We are not alone in abandoning this technology. Homes that were early adopters of satellite TV can have enormous dishes sitting in backyards or rigged on to poles projected above the roof line of their homes.

So what can you do with the hunk of metal you leave behind? Remove and recycle it or do what Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand has done with a dish they inherited from the New Zealand Post Office. The university decided to convert it into a radio telescope. Built in 1984, with a diameter of 30 meters (close to 100 feet), its previous use was for satellite communications.

Abandoned for scrap, the university cleaned off the rust and freed the mechanism from its limited range of motion to the 270 degrees of arc needed for radio astronomy. Then they replaced all of the control systems and motors, used a laser to determine the deformations in the dish so that they could compensate for them. Then they installed radio astronomy equipment for receiving signals from space. And finally they networked the dish so that it could transmit the data it received to the university.

This re-purposed satellite dish located in a remote northern area of New Zealand’s North Island is now a bona fide radio telescope capable of “first-class radio astronomy research” according to the paper published in the journal, Astronomical Society of Australia 2014.

Hmmm! Makes me think about all those abandoned satellite TV dishes and the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. Maybe we can convert them all and with SETI software create a super radio telescope. Or maybe not!