Pulsar is the size of Boston, about 20 km diameter. Wouldn't need a rectifier antenna much bigger than that to collect all it's radio energy. Very small low-mass structure. Energy could be converted to electricity with greater than 80% efficiency. I understand four exoplanets have been discovered orbiting pulsar PSR1257 about 978 lightyears away. "...these planets are permanently strafed by high-energy radiation and are considered extremely inhospitable for life of any form to emerge." But what if the star wasn't originally a pulsar? Spoooooky. Besides, if pulsars are formed from supernovas, how the heck did four planets survive with orbits of only a month or two?!?!

If we lived on a planet orbiting a pulsar, we would have a natural power source, an atomic clock, and a nearby gravitational lens for space telescopes. We might also have a gravitational slingshot strong enough to launch interstellar probes at relativistic speeds. Time also slows down near the pulsar's surface, so a telescope orbiting there could observe processes in the universes over far greater timespans without need for maintenance.

Super interesting!

This abstract indicates that the illumination region is about 18,600 km in diameter, which the eclipsing pulsar traverses in 27.4 seconds. Observations of radio emissions are between 0.427 and 1.4 GHz, the microwave band.

This summary indicates that the central pulsar spins once every 23 milliseconds, the orbiting pulsar once every 2.8 seconds with an orbital period of 2.4 hours. The two pulsars are separated by about 800,000 km and move in excess of 600 km/sec.

This page and this article indicates that this pulsar binary will allow fundamental tests of the general theory of relativity, and already expected is a 10-fold increase in the detection rate of gravitational waves from merging of double neutron star binaries. Also, they will be able to probe the magnetosphere of the orbiting pulsar. The two pulsars will merge into a black hole in about 80 million years.

Lots of artistic images here.