PAF Testing Underway at the Parkes Testbed Facility

Preparing the PAF for sky tests at CSIRO's Parkes facilities (with the Parkes Radio Telescope in the background). Credit: John Sarkission, CSIRO.
The PAF awaits testing to begin in front of the 12-m Patriot antenna of the Parkes Testbed Facility. Credit: John Sarkission, CSIRO.

21 June 2011

CSIRO’s first Phased Array Feed (PAF) receiver was recently completed and successfully integrated within a test engineering system at the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science headquarters at Marsfield, NSW.

PAFs or ‘radio cameras’, once fully developed, will be attached to the antennas of the next generation Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope, currently being constructed at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.

PAFs have many separate, simultaneous beams for detecting radio waves and allow telescopes to have a much wider field of view, and to scan the sky more quickly than alternative technologies.

The PAF has now been transported to the ASKAP test-bed facility at CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope Observatory for sky testing. This next stage of integration is now currently underway in the relatively radio-quiet environment of Parkes.

Performance of the complete receiver chain from the PAF, through analog-to-digital conversion and onto beamforming is now in the process of being further tested and analysed.

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