Junkbox Telescope Gallery

[jeff_duntemann]

Some years back I posted Jeff Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery, and for reasons unclear it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction may not be quite dead...) So a while back I wrote up and (almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built

Comments

[baron_waste]

Speaking of old pictures and gadgets…

http://i28.tinypic.com/2qtct9y.jpg

Mr Duntemann, what are these two standing in front of? I thought it was a heliograph, at first glance; shows where my mind is.

I think it's a microwave receiver. Am I all wet?

[jeff_duntemann]

That's an odd one; I'm not sure women who look like that overlap with the timeline of microwave communications. There's another possibility: A parabolic microphone. There's not enough resolution to get a good look at the device itself, though my imagination wants to think that the coax connector is a Neill connector, which is good up to the low microwaves. The only remaining possibility is that this was some sort of Hollywood shoot from the 1950s, trying to emulate the 1930s. I don't think microwave gear using parabolic reflectors existed prior to WWII, though I'll have to dig in the stacks to check fersure.

Now. Wherethehell did that photo come from?

[baron_waste]

Uh, well, here, actually.

[baron_waste]

D' ye know, you're probably right about it being a parabolic mike. A serious parabolic mike. With today's equipment, that hombre could pick up a conversation out to the horizon - from a mountaintop.

Or, in this case, pick out dialogue spoken on a beach with wind and surf. I mean, these are movie stars, out on location; what else could it be?

[jeff_duntemann]

If those two women are in fact the young Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, the photo would have been taken circa 1935, possibly a couple of years earlier. Microwave communications was being talked about and perhaps tinkered with in government labs in 1935, but did not exist in that refined a form prior to WWII. I can guess that what we're looking at is a film being shot on location, and the device is a directional microphone used to record sound while filming an outdoor scene without having microphones hanging over the heads of the beach babes.

I could be wrong, but I think that's a fair guess.