Hi All,
With our 9.3m telescope we have done some more measurements on water masers on 22GHz.
Measuring 22GHz masers with a 1m dish is also possible as Eduard has shown!
A thermostat was used to stabilize the DRO. If not done so; the signal will drift in frequency, and adding/stacking will result in no result or very poor and misformed result.
Pointing/tracking the telescope is also difficult; an absolute elevation encoder is a must.
Drifting (rain) clouds in front of the beam will also attenuate the signal.
We modified the DRO osc. setting of the Norsat 9000LDF slightly, by increasing the frequency of the LO. This results in a lower IF frequency of 1.1GHz.
This frequency now can be captured by a standard SDR dongle.
Calibrating the intensity scale is difficult; almost all the masers vary, so cannot be used as a standard Jy scale., but still working on it. Venus can be used as a standard GHz source it seems.
All data was captured with Cfrad2.exe on W7 and W10 machines.
We also did a drift measurement on W49 to show that without tracking motors you still can capture W49.
Next month I will put this 2022 session also on the website.
Michiel