> eh?   
> 
> who's chladni?  waveplates sound interesting...more input.
Chladni, as I recall, is the guy who used vibrating waveplates which used
'sand' (I think?) so he could see the interference patterns caused by
waves. 
 
> Trust me, I have limited knowledge of COBOL and C.  The most advanced
> things I did in C were pointers and some arrays! 
You wouldn't need much knowledge beyond that. (COBOL is evil, BTW). :)
> Unfortunately, not being a scientist in the field of radio telescopes, I
> have no idea what the information looks like when received from space.  I
> might have to do some reading when I have time. 
Well, if all you want to do is just provide some arbitrary frequencies and
see what their interference pattern looks like, you shouldn't have any
problems. I don't have any idea what the format is for the data coming
from radio telescopes is either, so I cant help you there.