Various downloads will be available on UKARANet. The downloads available now are papers in TIFF format. Where possible, these will be converted to more userfriendly formats over time and made available on another UKARANet page for download or online viewing.

BAA Papers: Papers on Radio Astronomy written by the members of the British Astronomical Association:
These papers comprised a handbook produced by the BAA Radio Astronomy Section in the 1960's. The first part is not of a technical nature. However, it is a window onto the start of Amateur Radio Astronomy in the UK. We would draw your attention to the quotation of Sir Martin Ryle's encouraging comments at the outset of this endeavour.

While the electronics are outdated, the basic principles, system requirements and physics have remained unchanged.

Keep in mind that these papers were only available in hard copy and had to be scanned in. Due to the age of the documents, the quality is not always very good. Fortunately very little information has been lost due to age. It was felt that the documents are valuable enough to be converted into electronic form and be made available to everyone.

We would like to thank the BAA for allowing us to scan and publish these papers.

The size of each file is given in brackets after its name.

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1. BAA Paper 1: "Amateur Programmes and Projects in the Past"
• Paper 1 Part 1: "The History and Policy of the Radio Astronomy Section March 1957 to December 1963" [15 pages - 1402kB]
• Paper 1 Part 2: "Amateur Programmes" [13 pages - 1244kB]
• Paper 1 Part 3: "A Low Frequency Interferometer" [26 pages - 2310kB]
• Paper 1 Part 4: "Starting a Project in Radio Astronomy" [ pages - 1025kB]
2. BAA Paper 2:
• Paper 2 Part 1: "Radio Observations of the Sun" [14 pages - 1086kB]
• Paper 2 Part 2: "A Summary of Observations of Dynamic Spectra" [12 pages - 1050kB]
• Paper 2 Part 3: "Cosmic Rays: Their nature, origin and their relation to solar emission phenomena" [15 pages - 1430kB]
• Paper 2 Parts 4 and 5: "Objective methods of classification of solar recordings" [12 pages - 827kB]
• Paper 2 Part 6: "The Occultation of the Crab Nebula by the Solar Corona" [21 pages - 2600kB]
3. Paper 3: "Designing a Simple Radio Telescope" [15 pages - 1453kB]
4. Paper 4: "A simple Radio Telescope for operation at 200Mc/s" [27 pages - 2242kB]

JRS Papers: A collection of papers written by John R. Smith.
John R Smith was a pioneer of amateur radio astronomy in the UK who influenced people to embark on their own radio astronomy projects. These papers span many years, so you will need to see past the older technology in the earlier writings to the clear explanations of the principles and concepts that are as fresh today as when they were written. We are pleased to be able to make them available to those who have not had the opportunity to read them before.

The JRS papers also had to be scanned in from old documents in paper format. The same is therefore true for them as for the BAA papers. Where possible, these papers will also be gradually converted to a more user- and webfriendly format and made available on other UKARANet pages for download or online viewing.

We would like to thank the Smith family for granting us permission to reproduce the papers here.

(Right Click - Save As)

JRS Papers: This is a zipped file containing "JRS_Papers.tif" and "JRS_Papers_index.tif". [99 pages - 3129kB]

Radio Astronomy Presentation given to the Orpington Astronomical Society 23 January 2003 (James Wilhelm):

This is a general Radio Astronomy presentation. It is made available here in case someone finds it useful. Feel free to use any part or all of it. Please mention UKARANet if you do and let us know.

View HTML: The presentation viewable over the web.

Zipped file containing presentation in HTML format: This is a zipped file containing the webpages viewable above. [720kB]