Site of Grote'Reber's Hectometre Radio Observatory

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This paddock once housed an array of 23m poles supporting dipoles and used to observe the galactic core at around 1.5MHz, the first time anyone had ever tried to observe the sky at such low frequencies. The ionosphere normally reflects this long wavelength, but on long, cold winter nights, shielded from the sun by the bulk of the Earth, the ionosphere would become partially transparent at this long wavelength allowing one to "see" out into interstellar space. This site was chosen to be remote from man-made radio sources and attain ionosphereic transparency on a few cold winter nights. A hut sat in the middle of the paddock which housed the receiver. The whole thing was battery powered because mains cables conduct too much man made radio frequency signals.