Some more "Trivia" for you and other interested parties....

The actual idea was conceived by Dr. Robert S. Dixon W8ERD, who at the time
was Assitant Director of the Ohio State RadioObservatory (Big Ear) and
Director of the Academic Computer Center. I was working there as a Graduate
Research Assistant (official title) and Chief Engineer (unofficial title)
and had not yet decided on a thesis topic. He was wondering if it would be
possible to digitize the signals at each antenna element in an array and
then, through digital signal processing, form all possible beams in all
directions simultaneously. And the rest is history, as the saying goes.

Also, I had previously read the book Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clark,
where he describes a space based array that could look in all directions
simultaneously. He called it "Argus", and I thought that we should use the
same name for our system. My prototype, however, was called a Radio Camera
since the basic idea was to form a picture of the RF environment, and the
name Argus is now being used for the present system at OSU (not to be
confused with the system that uses satellite TV dishes at many locations).

You'll get a laugh out of this... My original system used a PDP-11/40 with
a whopping 10 MB of hard disk. I had the whole thing to myself as exclusive
user. Even at that it was too slow (even with a 10 kHz signal bandwidth),
so I collected the raw data and processed it off-line. I used weather radio
stations at 162.55 MHz as my sources since they all run the same power and
same antennas. Any differences in signal would be due to propagation and
distance.

The basic idea of Argus is to be able to look in all directions at the same
time, thereby increasing the chance of detecting transient signals. Big Ear
had detetected some transients (the most famous being the WOW! signal)
mainly from the direction of the galactic poles, but considering that it
would take Big Ear several years to survey the entire sky the detection of
such transient signals is pure luck. An Argus system, however, can survey
the entire sky (by this I mean what is visible from a given location---you
would need one in space to see everything) in one day, theoreticaly.

--
Jim
N8EE