The Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope (CHART) Project

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.