Wow@Home – Network of Amateur Radio Telescopes

This page presents a test of our first Wow@Home Radio Telescope hardware and software configuration (Figure 1). The system is tested for a network of small radio telescopes designed to emulate, as closely as possible, the observation protocol of the meridian radio telescope Big Ear used by the Ohio SETI project in the 1970s. As in the original setup, we use a 10 kHz channel width and a 12-second integration time. However, our system differs in several ways: it features 256 channels instead of 50, a much larger beam size, but significantly lower sensitivity. The telescope is fixed at a constant elevation, pointed south, and scans a specific celestial declination over the course of one or more days using a wide field of view of approximately 25° (HPBW or its beamwidth). As the Earth rotates, this configuration allows the telescope to capture a continuous 360° strip of the sky at that declination. After completing three or more full-sky passes, the telescope is adjusted to a new elevatio ... Read full article.