He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering work and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies.

Reber sold his telescope to the National Bureau of Standards, and it was erected on a turntable at their field station in Sterling, Virginia.

Eventually the telescope made its way to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia,[11] and Reber supervised its reconstruction at that site.

Instead he turned to a field that was being largely ignored, that of medium frequency (hectometre) radio signals in the 0.5–3 MHz range, around the AM broadcast bands.

[13] There, on very cold, long, winter nights the ionosphere would, after many hours shielded from the Sun's radiation by the bulk of the Earth, 'quieten' and de-ionize, allowing the longer radio waves into his antenna array.

Tasmania also offered low levels of man-made radio noise, which permitted reception of the faint signals from outer space.

In the 1960s, he had an array of dipoles set up on the sheep grazing property of Dennistoun, about 7.5 km (5 miles) northeast of the town of Bothwell, Tasmania, where he lived in a house of his own design and construction he decided to build after he purchased a job lot of coach bolts at a local auction.

He imported 4x8 douglas fir beams directly from a sawmill in Oregon, and then high technology double glazed window panes, also from the US.

The window panes formed a north facing passive solar wall, heating mat black painted, dimpled copper sheets, from which the warmed air rose by convection.

Reber was not a believer of the Big Bang theory; he believed that red shift was due to repeated absorption and re-emission or interaction of light and other electromagnetic radiations by low density dark matter, over intergalactic distances, and in 1977 he published an article called "Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe", which outlined his theory.