It opened in 1959 in order to host a number of the National Research Council of Canada's (NRC) ongoing experiments in a more radio-quiet location than Ottawa.

[1] The site also hosts a hydrogen maser, a standard feature for radio telescopes that can also serve to receive telemetry from deep space missions.

Other instruments formerly at the site included a solar-observing array of thirty-two 10 ft (3 m) dishes, and a single 1.8 m solar flux monitor observing at 10.7 cm wavelength, and an 18 m radio telescope from the University of Toronto.

Prior to the construction of the ARO, Arthur Covington had been running a solar observation program at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) Ottawa Radio Field Station.

[5] A second 6 ft (1.8 m) telescope, identical to the one at ARO, was later installed at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, British Columbia as a backup.

[7] In 1988 the NRC invited the operators of the Hay River Radio Observatory in the Northwest Territories, the Interstellar Electromagnetics Institute (IEI), to relocate their SETI efforts to ARO.

The smaller University of Toronto antenna and the 32-dish solar observatory were both donated to project TARGET, and have since been relocated to a new site near Shelburne, Ontario.

The observatory is also equipped with a hydrogen maser that maintains time standard stability to one part in 1015 in order to facilitate data correlation.

Since 2012, the main instrument has participated in an international collaboration to observe pulsars at long wavelengths with the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.

In April 2020, the recently refurbished original 33 foot antenna co-detected a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) from galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 as part of the CHIME collaboration.

By careful correlation of this data researchers hope to create a telescope aperture with a resolving power equivalent to the diameter of the Earth.