The Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope

Radio astronomy is a fun and cheap way to observe the sky. Our goal with this project is to create an easy to navigate system of tutorials that will lead to you in building your own radio telescope in your home or classroom and then observing the sky with it. The horn is made of cardboard and the other parts are easy to find. The goal is to keep the total cost to under $200. The tutorials provide all the knowledge and software needed to build your CHART instrument and measure and analyze the spiral structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Here is a video introduction to the project.

Get Started

To read about the science, you can check out the Science Background page. Then, to build your telescope, acquire the materials listed on the Telescope Construction page, which also includes instructions to build the horn that will function as your telescope and set up the software. Once you have your telescope, there are instructions for Observing and then Data analysis to take measurements of the Milky Way and analyze the resulting data files.

The tutorials assume very little background in radio astronomy, electronics, or computer programming. However, if the topics are very new to you, see the Resources page for some supplementary reading. Finally, if you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact the team. The information is available on the About page.

If you’re interested in contributing to the code base, or viewing the Github repository where the code exists, see the repo here.