Hardware correlator testing underway

Cables plugged in to the ASKAP beamformer.

3 June 2013

Members of the ASKAP team will soon travel out to the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) to test remote commissioning of the hardware correlator on site with ASKAP antennas.

At the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science (CASS) Marsfield site in Sydney, the team has tested coding and development of the correlator, and are now ready to progress to integration and functional testing in the lab.

To do this, a test signal is provided to three beamformers, which provide beam data to the hardware correlator under control of the Computing group's Telescope Operating System (TOS).

The test will test both the real-time and engineering display console, and the output of the ASKAP ingest pipeline. The correlated signals are sent to a computer, where phase closure is carried out.

The first version of the hardware correlator for BETA (the first six ASKAP antennas installed with phased array feed receivers) has nine dual polarisation beams, 152 MHz of bandwidth and a fine filterbank generating 18.5 kHz channel resolution.

Once successful phase closure tests are carried out in the lab with the hardware correlator, the team will then be ready to take the equipment out to the MRO for remote onsite phase closure testing using an astronomical source as the input.

Over the coming months, onsite commissioning activities will also include the shipment of main equipment for all six of the BETA ASKAP antennas to be sent to site, including additional pedestal racks, beamformers and correlator boards. Integration and testing of the equipment will follow soon after.

Back to Latest ASKAP News page.

Back to top

Access: 
Public