Small Ku Band Radio Telescope (1m)

Early this year I started to build a small radio telescope for my undergraduate thesis.The idea came to me as a smaller and open (without Radio Eyes) version of the Robert Arrowsmith's SDR radio telescope. In order to make a contribution to other students and educators all over the world, the main goals of the project are the following:

• Create an open hardware and affordable altazimuth mount  
• Create Python modules for control and coordinate conversions
• Start a complete open hardware/software astronomical platform for educational proposes in long term.  

This week I've already finished the mount and I began to test the movement of the antenna. I'm using a Raspberry Pi as main control unit. The digital controllers for the motors are implemented in a microcontroller board called Miuva with a Pololu Qik 2s12v10 dual motor driver:

 And this is how the system looks like when is assembled:

Once the mount is calibrated after add a magnetometer and an IMU, I will take some data using a FunCube and a RSA306B USB Spectrum Analyzer (which is not mine, sadly, but my adviser is letting me use it).

This post is only a brief teaser, but I promise I will release everything as soon as I get my degree!