This brief chapter discusses the basic things you need to know about amateur radio astronomy. Radio Receiver Systems. RadioScience Observing revolves around radio receivers and antennas. In this chapter you will find descriptions of the various forms of radio receiver design, as well as information on how to interpret receiver specifications. Radio Signal Propagation.
Radio signals propagate in different ways at different frequencies, locations and times.
This chapters presents the fundamentals of radio propagation in order to allow you to have some appreciation of what you hear when doing RadioScience Observing. 5. Signals, Noise and Reception. Radio reception is basically a duel between noise and signals. They often traverse the Earth's magnetosphere, where differential velocity causes the simultaneous bursts on different frequencies to spread temporally. This creates a descending sweeping tone on frequencies from 10 KHz down to less than 1 KHz.