This was from the “Big Ear” radiotelescope at Ohio State, run by John Kraus, author of the textbook “Electromagnetics” and a ham radio operator W8JK. It was on

This was from the “Big Ear” radiotelescope at Ohio State, run by John Kraus, author of the textbook “Electromagnetics” and a ham radio operator W8JK. It was one of the textbooks in my EE curriculum. Several years after i graduated, I found myself in Ann Arbor and stumbled in to the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club. Some of the members were top-notch contesters. One of the contests that was run when I was there was the 160 meter contest. W8UM had always placed pretty well, but the Ohio State club kinda beat everyone. They used the football-sized reflective base of the Big Ear with a balloon (actually a kitoon) to hold up the vertical. Huge signal. Turns out that in order to let the club use that structure, JK used them to do a bunch of cleanup around this massive structure. The year that I was part of the UM team, we got permission to use an old AM radio tower in disuse and did pretty well ourselves. Much fun.