[Tagging] Radio telescopes

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 4:46 PM Warin <61sundowner at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 25/10/18 23:56, Paul Allen wrote:
>
> BTW, these days few radio telescopes are dishes.  Most of them are phased
> arrays and not on towers
> or masts.
>
>
> That depends on the frequency of operation.
>
> New dish reflecting ones are being build. They simply perform the best for
> the intended frequencies.
>

And there are dishes with phased arrays at the feed point, for beam
forming, and phased arrays of dishes, for long-baseline interferometry.  It
all depends on what frequency, SNR, polarization and angular resolution you
need. Paul is right that larger phased arrays are now practicable because
of better electronics, giving dishes less of an advantage, but phased
arrays are as old as radio astronomy. Jansky built his "merry-go-round"
Bruce antenna (20.5 MHz) in 1932, while Reber didn't build his first dish
until 1937. Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars on a phased array built at
Cambridge by Ryle and Hewish (which also produced the 3C catalog of radio
sources - including 3C273, the first known quasar).

The conclusion is either, "Life is full of tradeoffs," or "you really don't
want to know!"
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