Maybe not so much now, but back in the days of magazines like Radio Constructor, you often did have ham based radio telescopes using ex war or military equipment Of course the sensitivity and frequencies were limited unless you had access to nitrogen cooled electronics to keep the noise down. Certainly the dishes and horns were not that hard to make though goodness knows what planning authorities would make of such constructions these days. Even now you can by connecting an lnb to a scanner covering its output frequency see the noise from the sun if you of point it that way. Sorry I messed this program. I vaguely knew it was on but have seen so many programmes about how they made Jodrel Bank in the early days, I thought it was going over old ground. Back in the day organisations like the national Physical laboratory and the Mullard Laboratory gave people things that today would raise eyebrows on the top secret scale, but back then, these were all scientists and would never do anything dodgy with them would they? I mean when the Russians sent their first impactor to the Moon they used old technology almost off the shelf to send their data back. It sounded very like a fairly so low fax transmission much as newsrooms and police control rooms had for sending pictures. This was why they could decode them so easily.
Brian