There 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 upg

There 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.