KEYWORDS: Antennas, Design, Signal processing, Clocks, Phased arrays, Analog to digital converters, Digital signal processing, Electromagnetic coupling, Field programmable gate arrays
The Low-Frequency Array, or LOFAR, is the world's largest low-frequency radio telescope consisting of over 100 000 antenna elements spread across more than 50 stations throughout Europe. LOFAR2.0 is an upgrade of LOFAR which will significantly improve its sensitivity and overcome several limitations encountered during the last 10 years of operation. The digital beamformers form the core of each LOFAR station. They are called antenna processing sub-racks (APS), where all antenna signals are digitized and digitally processed to form beams on the sky. These beamformers have stringent performance requirements, such as high linearity due to strong radio-frequency interference, good timing for high beamformer efficiency, and very low common-noise and cross-talk to be sky-noise limited over long integration times. The designs of the new LOFAR2.0 beamformer are presented, showing how a balance was struck between performance and cost enabling the production of high volumes, easy installation and maintenance in the field. The antenna processing subrack consists of low-noise receiver units (RCU) which digitise about a hundred RF signals, a clock and control board (APSCT) to distribute the sampling clock and control the digitisers, a power generation board (APSPU), UniBoard2s where FPGAs perform the beamforming, and a midplane that connects all the boards together while also shielding the sensitive receivers. The APS therefore has boards ranging from high-speed, high-density digital processing devices and high-current power converters to low-noise RF electronics. It has hundreds of devices to power, cool, control and monitor and hundreds of gigabits of data which need to be transferred between boards. The first LOFAR station has been upgraded with new beamformers and the first results will be presented. This demonstrates the new capabilities LOFAR2.0 will have with the new beamformers.
The Calibration Unit for 4MOST is providing hundreds of highly stable sharp spectral features with high power and mimicking the sky over the focal plane. The heart of the system is a combination of a bright broadband lamp and a Fabry-Perot etalon that provides a regular comb of spectral lines. 120 integrating spheres are distributed in 4 Light sabre linear arrays. These Light sabres are attached to the telescope spider struts and provide unvignetted illumination to the telescope focal plane. We describe the final design, the alignment, and the results of the testing.
A novel concept for the calibration of multi object fiber-fed spectrographs is described for the 4MOST instrument. The 4MOST facility is foreseen to start science operations in 2022 at the ESO VISTA telescope. The calibration system provides intensity, wavelength and resolution calibrations for the 4MOST spectrographs. The heart of the system is a combination of a bright broad band lamp and a Fabry-Perot etalon. The lamp is able to provide sufficient flux to illuminate the VISTA focal plane and the Fabry-Perot etalon provides a regular comb of spectral lines. The Fabry-Perot etalon can be moved in and out of the optical beam to choose between intensity and spectral calibrations. A fiber bundle of 156 fibers is guided to the VISTA spider arms where each fiber is connected to a small integrating sphere. The integrating spheres are attached to the bottom side of the four VISTA telescope spider struts and provide unvignetted illumination of the telescope. The exit port of the integrating spheres is projected on the VISTA focal plane with a small collimator lens. The integrating spheres assure a uniform illumination of the focal plane and are insensitive to FRD effects of the input fibers due to motion and stress during telescope movements. The calibration system illumination only originates from the telescope spiders and therefore the telescope pupil is not fully filled. The calibration system uses the azimuthal scrambling properties of the fibers that connect the telescope focal plane and the spectrometers to completely fill the spectrograph pupil.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.