[time-nuts] nubie querie

[Paul Boven]

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.