Looks familiar?

“Bargain Hunt” (BBC2 12th Feb 2026) visited Jodrell Bank today. The heritage officer for the giant radio telescope there pointed out that the original prototype mechanism was cobbled together from ex-WW2 radar equipment.  Their photos look very familiar.

Radio astronomer Bernard Lovell had originally worked on military radar in the 1940s. In the next decade, he and his team made a DIY telescope out of the old radar equipment he had used during the Second World War.  What they found was that they could study meteors using radar kit to make a proto telescope. They also detected the first extra-galactic radio waves from nearby Andromeda galaxy. That discovery led to the construction of the world-famous Jodrell Bank radio telescope dish.