UK902: LOFAR4SW testbed station

The LOFAR4SW project has the past year made significant progress towards preparing for LOFAR2.0. In particular, the project has accomplished the import milestone of commissioning a testbed prototype station called UK902. It is located at the Chilbolton Observatory in the United Kingdom, alongside the existing UK608 station. Building started August 2019 and first light was on the 19 September 2020. Although it does not use the LOFAR2.0 infrastructure – in fact it is only 4 LOFAR1.0 HBA tiles and half the nominal number RSPs (Remote Station Processing) – it has allowed the LOFAR4SW project to implement end-to-end testing of the main data reduction pipelines. Tests have also allowed the project to quantify back-end data reduction requirements.

Above, in the header is a photo of UK902 and below the first light, dynamic spectrum from the station processed using the iLiSA S/W, the software package developed for LOFAR4SW operations in station stand-alone mode.

Author: Tobia Carozzi (WP6 Lead) and LOFAR4SW team

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