December 30, 2008

As you can see, we are still working on the web site.  This past Christmas weekend we did a lot of work in the radio observatory.  We got the second SID unit up and running.  The data is shown under SARA on the Stanford Solar site.  We installed another short counter top for this and the Hewlett Packard 3586C Selective Level Meter.  We put in another computer donated to us that Bill added memory to and we did lots of updates and deletion of viruses

Bill also built a case for the Chrylser radio that will be used for meteor detection.  We still have to build the Yagi antenna for this unit.


December 19, 2008

We are expanding our web site.  Over the next few weeks you will find more pages devoted to specific projects with expanded information and photos.  Let us know what you think!

November 23, 2008

Dick Castle, Bill Seymour, Bill and myself traveled to the Tamke-Allen Observatory today to install the dual dipole Radio Jove antenna.  Dr. David Fields had the poles up and conduit laid from the antenna to the building.  Our job was to mount the antenna and combiner to the poles and pull the coax cable through the conduit.

The location was on sloped ground, so the first thing that had to be done was extend two of the poles 40" higher so the antenna would be level.  This was done with a two by four cut in half and lots of screws.  David Fields, Jeff Haun and Misty were on site to help.

After some adjustments, the antenna was installed and connection made to the radio inside the classroom.  Here are a few photos from our afternoon of antenna installation.

November 8, 2008

We finally have the 10 foot dish painted and mounted on the pole.  We have been busy with family and work, so have not gotten it calibrated and on line yet.  We hope to have some time this month to work on the system.

We have installed a battery backup on our two computers in the radio observatory.  Our power will go out periodically for short periods of time, so this will help to keep us up and collecting data.  Bill is working on a battery system for the Radio Jove and SID receivers.  He wants to hook up a trickle charger to the battery that is solar powered.  We will keep you posted on how this works.

Dick Castle and Bill built a new Radio Jove antenna system for the Tamke-Allen Observatory in Rockwood, Tennessee.  We plan to go to the observatory this month and install the dual dipole antenna on the poles David Fields has had installed.

September 15, 2008

                                                           We went outside tonight and cleaned this big dish.  It will be ready for some fresh paint soon.  While we were outside, we were getting a very light rain.  We stopped and looked up and saw a spectacular rainbow.  I even got a few pictures along with the setting sun.  Check out our Flickr page.  

We have also been working on setting up a computer for Bill Seymour.  Looks like it is ready for him to start observing the sun and Jupiter.

September 2, 2008

We spent this last Saturday taking down the neighbor's 10 foot satellite dish and have started cleaning it so Bill can paint.  We are excited to be getting this dish which should improve our ability to monitor hydrogen at 1420 MHz.

August 2008

We are just getting our web page completed.  I went with a template since I know less than nothing about HTML- it might as well be Greek.

We are already making changes to our SpectraCyber set up thanks to help from Carl Lyster.  We are putting in a better coax cable and we will be getting a 10 foot C-band dish from a neighbor (free for the taking) when the weather cools a bit more.  These two changes should really improve our ability to monitor hydrogen in the Milky Way.

We are working on a dual dipole antenna with Dick Castle that is portable and easy to set up for Radio Jove.  The poles are fiberglass sections about 4 foot in length that fit into each other.  We can experiment with tilting the antenna and compare reception with our fixed dual dipole.  We will report on that later as we get more of it completed. 

We have been collecting data on the SID receiver and uploading daily to the Stanford University web page. Check out KARNS data at http://sid.stanford.edu/database-browser/.  We have not detected any flares yet, but the unit is running good and seems to be calibrated correctly.

July 2008

We attended the annual SARA conference at Green Bank, WV this summer.  It was a lot of fun and educational.  Check out a few pictures on our Flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/tnskynet/.


Contact us:

Bill & Melinda Lord