4 ms·
> This radio telescope consists of 4,096 dipole antennas Does anyone know the significance, if any, of there being 2^12 antennas?
by danans 6y ago
> This radio telescope consists of 4,096 dipole antennas
Does anyone know the significance, if any, of there being 2^12 antennas?
- jandrese 6y agoProbably a 64x64 grid.
- danans 6y agoBut why 64x64 then? Is that just to match some characteristic (i.e . number of inputs) of the data aggregation/logging device (more likely), or is it something about the physics of the type of signal they are trying to detect (less likely)? There are, after all, plenty of possible square grid combinations bit only some are powers of 2.
- praveen9920 6y agoIt must be for separating the visible area into smaller grids for analysis. I also assume some level of error correction is needed and pair of antennas data need to be somehow correlated
- torrance 6y agoThere are 128 grids of 4x4 antennas. There’s nothing special about the 128 figure, and very soon it will be doubled - but there were also talks of a smaller upgrade too. The 4x4 tile size is a compromise between sensitivity and field of view. 5x5 or 6x6 configurations would be much more sensitive to signal but at the expense of a much smaller field of view, since the field of view is formed using phased arrays. For imaging purposes actually we’d really like the smaller field of view, because it would make it easier to avoid nasty bright radio sources from washing out our observations, but for detecting this epoch if reinionization signal, the bigger field of view is better since it’s a global full-sky signal.
- consp 6y agoLOFAR uses 24 (or 48) per station for the "high" frequency tiles and 96 for the lower frequency ones if I'm not mistaken, so a power of two is not by definition required.