Introduction

The University of Iowa recently purchased a Small Radio Telescope (SRT), a commercially available instructional radio telescope system designed at Haystack Observatory and used at over 80 installations world-wide. During the Fall semster 2003 the SRT was used to teach radio astronomical techniques as a part of the upper-level undergraduate course Astronomical Laboratory.

We have created a new software control system (named e-SRT) for the SRT, and in addition made several hardware upgrades to the telescope itself. The e-SRT software is written in the Python language using the wxWindows graphical library. The e-SRT program has a flexible, user-friendly interface and runs on Linux, MS-Windows, and Macintosh platforms. It provides a large number of enhanced features, and well as several new capabilities not available in the original Java-based software provided with the SRT. Enhanced features include better telescope motion control, enhanced continuum (strip chart) and spectral line plotting, more flexible chart control, and resizable task windows. New capabilities include a client-server architecture for efficient remote operation, support for a webcam, optional archived baseline spectra, support for optical shaft encoders, and diagnostic spectral line windows.

The Iowa e-SRT will be made available for external educational use starting in early March. We will provide the e-SRT software for other SRT sites at the same time.