[Grote Reber], a pioneer of radio astronomy who built an antenna dish in his back yard in Illinois in the 1930s and tuned it to radio signals from space, died Dec. 20 in Australia's southern island state of Tasmania.

Mr. Reber was the first person to build a radio telescope dedicated to astronomy, opening a window on the universe that eventually produced such landmark discoveries as quasars, pulsars and the remnant afterglow of the big bang, the observatory said in a statement. His self-financed experiments laid the foundation for today's advanced radio-astronomy facilities.

From 1938 to 1943, Mr. Reber made the first surveys of radio waves from the sky and produced the first radio map of the sky, the observatory history said. His articles in Astrophysical Journal in the early 1940s marked the beginning of intentional radio astronomy.