The Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope (CHART) Project

TL;DR

The CHART project offers an accessible, open-source amateur radio telescope enabling students and educators to perform radio astronomy, including detecting galactic 21-cm emission, fostering hands-on learning and community engagement.

Contribution

This work introduces a cost-effective, open-source radio telescope system designed for educational use, capable of detecting galactic 21-cm emission and suitable for diverse environments.

Findings

Successfully detects galactic 21-cm emission in rural and urban areas

System performance aligns with state-of-the-art surveys

Facilitates hands-on radio astronomy education

Abstract

We present the Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope (CHART), a project that provides hands-on radio instrumentation and design experience to undergraduates while bringing accessible radio astronomy experiments to high school students and teachers. Here we describe a system which can detect 21-cm emission from the Milky Way which is optimized for cost and simplicity of construction. Software, documentation, and tutorials are all completely open source to improve the user experience and facilitate community involvement. We demonstrate the design with several observations which we compare with state-of-the-art surveys. The system is shown to detect galactic 21-cm emission in both rural and urban settings.