At 10:40 PM 6/16/04 -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote:

0.25" glass will cost you 2-2.5 dB.

Perhaps there are speciality glasses or polymer sheets which reduce that loss.

...

At sufficiently good mechanical stabilization and gain, you will encounter perhaps

The best way to do this is to mount the narrow-angle dish *and* video camera on the same mount, then use simple circuitry to superimpose white circle on the center of the image when signal exceeds some threshold (or vary the size with signal level.) The results could be startling.

Nice idea; the radioastronomers do something like this (cross-band correlation) so they can see what their sources might correspond to.