Building a Program
If you're a school, science center, planetarium, astronomy club or other institution that wishes to get a radio astronomy program going, the first thing we recommend that you do is to find your local Amateur Radio group. Licensed radio operators - aka Hams - will be able to help with the technical side of setting up a program. They may also have some local members who are already familiar with radio astronomy. Your own organization may already have some hams in it.
There are many simple kits available online (listed below) that come with instructions and support. Most of these kits are affordable, or obtainable with small STEM education grants that can be found in local community foundations or in partnership with local philanthropists.
We are here to help! Join our Radio Astronomy Outreach Network Groups.io to keep the discussion going!
You can find your local amateur radio club here.
You can reach out to the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers. They have a kit that you can purchase for a few hundred dollars that will detect the galactic hydrogen.
There are a number of other programs that can help you get started. Radio Jove, NASA's radio astronomy initiative, that includes Solar, galactic, Jovian and geophysics radio activities. They have a kit that you can purchase for a few hundred dollars that needs minimal assembly and a basic computer.
The Interactive NASA Space Physics Ionosphere Radio Experiements (INSPIRE) project also has an inexpensive kit to enable students to engage with very low frequency radio waves generated by lightning and other geophysics phenomena.
If you need to find a local astronomy club to help out, then the NASA Night Sky Network has a good website for finding the active ones.
You can also reach out to the Astronomical League. As well as a list of clubs, they maintain a radio astronomy observers program and can likely help you find a nearby amateur radio astronomer or two.
Large non profit partnership projects that involve an educational institution, Amateur Radio Club and potentially other partners such as youth groups and astronomy clubs could be a strong contender for an ARDC grant. The website lists prior grants with details. Grants range from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars.