When in operation, 10 different radio dish antennas spread across a large part of the Earth (from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands) are all pointed at the same region in the sky. Each 82-foot (25 meter) dish antenna is controlled remotely from a single operations center in New Mexico. By functioning together, these antennas form a single virtual radio dish that has a useful aperture, or “baseline” of 5000 miles (8000 km) – compare that to the ten-meter diameter of Keck or Hubble’s 2.4 meters!