Our Radio Jove Radio telescope is up and operational. We assembled the final bits of the system on Friday April 29th, just after the Royal Wedding.

It involved accurately measuring the distance between the dual dipole antenna connection and the receiver, located inside the observatory. This turned out to be 16.78m (55′). The RG6 coax with velocity factors in, came out at 17.47m (57.24′) at the next largest 1/2 wavelength increment. The shorter the feedin coax, the less signal loss, so we decided to risk the narrow margin of safety of 1.5 wavelengths instead of going to 2
23.28m (76.36′).

The receiver is situated inside our metal shelled observatory, helping reduce RF interference, has audio speakers attached so we can listen to the live signal, and is connected to a laptop microphone port.
The laptop is maybe 7 years old and runs skypipe v2.1.17, which logs the data, creates graphs and uploads the data to this website.

We tested the system by disconnecting and reconnecting the antenna from the receiver and saw a distinct signal difference.
The most recent strip chart can be found here:



For 2011 the following settings were used for the antenna setup:
Jupiter declination runs from approx -2 to +12 degrees
Elevation angle at transit runs from 45 to 55 degrees at our latitude of 44.25 degrees.
The optimum antenna height for an elevation angle of 40-55 degrees is 4.57m (15′).

For 2012 the settings will be:
Jupiter declination runs from approx +10 to +21 degrees
Elevation angle at transit runs from 55 to 65 degrees at our latitude of 44.25 degrees.
The optimum antenna height for an elevation angle of 40-55 degrees is 3.05m (10′).
So we will have to lower the antenna then.