Even more trivia:
My work at the Big Ear under W8JK years before N8EE's work involved the
first digital recording of radio astronomy signals including time
information. (Slave labor, AKA graduate students, were used previously to
digitize the strip charts used.) The recording medium was punched paper
tape and the (very off-line) processor was an IBM 1620 (or something like
it - it was a true decimal machine intended originally for accounting - some
arithmetic operations involved table look up!). It took several orders of
magnitude improvement in computational power and in ancillary equipment to
arrive at what Jim was able to do. I delight in that progress.
Pertinent to this group, is the admonition that one still needs to
understand the analog part of any such information gathering system even
while digital power increases. At least within my remaining lifetime, the
antenna(s), transmission line(s), and "first stage" will remain the province
of analog engineering. This group will have plenty to discuss before it is
supplanted with an A to D converter!
73 Mac N8TT
--
J. Mc Laughlin; Michigan U.S.A.
Home:
"JLB" wrote in message
...
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.

snip
--
Jim
N8EE