After planning the construction process and waiting for the parts to arrive, I've finally finished building my prototype. It's far from the finished product, but it has all the basics it needs to begin picking up waves from space. In previous blogs, I discussed how I plan to build it and the function of each component that will go into the structure. None of that has changed, so I won't explain it again. If you are curious about it, I suggest you read Update 6: Initial Parts Have Arrived. However, in this blog, I'm sharing my first impressions of the telescope—how stable, portable, and heavy it feels—and what's coming up next.
Starting with how portable it is, I think you can tell by the picture that this won't be easy to move around. The dish itself measures around 45 inches corner-to-corner, which is about the size of an average flat-screen TV. With that in mind, it won't be simple to reposition and pick up signals. As a result, I'm going to build a stand for it, but I'll discuss that later in the blog. Luckily, however, it isn't as heavy as you'd think—I can easily bear the weight of the entire telescope with just my pinky. This is thanks to the grid pattern of the dish, which uses far less metal than a solid sheet.
Now, the stability isn't all sunshine and rainbows. As a matter of fact, when I was assembling the dish, I had to join two halves together because the company I bought it from couldn't send it in one piece—it would have been way too big. Consequently, when I was tightening the bolts that held the two pieces together, this happened:
Everything still works fine, and it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but I'll only know later on. Hopefully that crack doesn't expand, but I now know that I shouldn't put too much stress on the dish.
This coming week, I'll test whether it works or not. If it does, then I'll begin modifying it. If it doesn't… well, then I'm going to spend a lot of time troubleshooting. My plan going forward is to localize everything onto a single device so that it can run automatically and, hopefully, map the Milky Way.
It would take a signal from a specific point in the sky, measure its intensity, and map it on a grid based on its location using a shade of white, black, or a gray tone in between, depending on how strong the signal is. If it's weak, the shade would be lighter; if it's strong, it would be darker. This way, I can map out the Milky Way based on the radio waves it emits.