Introducing:
Christian Andreas Monstein, born 18/09/1953, Switzerland
Family:
I'm married to Brigitte Monstein-Halter since 1982 and we have got two nice children, Claudia-Corina born 1982 and Stefan-Andreas born 1985. Since about 1982 we are living in Freienbach on the south coast of the lake of Zurich.
Education:
First I went to public school for nine years, then I got a four year apprenticeship as a radio- and TV- technician. After that I went to the technical college Konstanz (Fachhochschule) in Germay to study electronics engineer for another five years. Several times I had to go to the Swiss Army, where I was tought in operating, installing and mending short wave communication electronics for CENTURION tanks.
Former Employers:
I worked about 8 years for STANDARD TELEPHON und RADIO AG, a Swiss company of ITT where I designed hardware and software for automatic telecommunication testequipment. Then I worked another 9 years for ALCATEL Switzerland as a design engineer with a group of five electronic engineers and technicians. After that I worked about two years for AXICOM where I specified and designed high speed and high sensitive automatic inprocess testequipment for telecom relay production lines.
Current Employer:
1997 I made my hobby to my job: I got a new job at the Astronomical Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). I'm engaged in the RAPP (Radio Astronomy and Plasma Physics Group http://www.astro.phys.ethz.ch/rapp/ ) of Prof. Dr. A. O. Benz. There I'm responsible for the students telescope, a parabolic mirror with 5m diameter on top of the sun tower near the Semper Observatory in Zurich. Being fully computercontrolled, it was designed to operate at 2.6GHz ... 3.0GHz. Additionally we operate another 5m telescope in the decimetric radio band in Bleien between Luzern and Aarau. Our main instrument the successor of DAEDALUS respective IKARUS is called PHOENIX-2. Its antenna is a 7m parabolic mirror operating between 100MHz and 4GHz with different bandwidths (1, 3 and 10MHz) at a speed of 2000 measurements per second in intensity and polarization. We are very proud of this instrument supported by the NF (Swiss National Fond), it is the broadest frequency agile radio spectrometer in the world collecting Stokes parameters I and V with programable frequency, switchcode and bandwidth. The instrument automatically tracks the sun from sunrise to sunset each day during the whole year.
Affiliations:
Hobbies:
Astronomy and especially radioastronomy with low cost equipment found on junkyards. At the moment I'm testing our new IRASEB instrument (International Radio Telescope Array for the Search of Extraterrestrial Bursts). A few highly motivated HAM's HB9SCT, HB9XM, HB9CKL and DC1GS have designed and built such instruments to search for prompt emission from extraterrestrial bursts whatever their source may be. For this instrument I intend to use our 10m parabolic mirror at 'Ricken Sued', have a look at: http://www.setileague.org/photos/swisspix.htm. We have planned to use different instruments between 137MHz and 10GHz fully computercontrolled with 2000 measurements per second. The necessary clocks will be supplied by the ASTRA-1D satellite, and the timing information will be taken from atomic clocks transmitted by DCF77. We intend to crosscorrelate all the data collected as soon as the BATSE-experiment on COMPTON observatory satellite detects a gamma ray burst within the observed region of the sky.
On the other side I'm involved in paraphysics in the region of magnetism, electrostatics and exotic electromagnetic effects that are no longer mentioned in the latest literature. As a counterpart I love collecting, defining (and eating) mushrooms from our local natural environment as well as hiking and mountaineering in the surounding hills and mountains together with my family. And last but not least, on warm and beautiful days I like riding my motorbike, a YAMAHA 500 XV.
Selected Papers:
Papers written in English are mentioned here only, another 70 titles in German, published elsewhere.
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