Today progress on the Prescott HERA dish took the form of building the dish hub and rim. The hub is where all the dish supports (25′ pvc pipes) meet. The hub is made using concentric “sonotube” concrete forms in which are embedded 3″ plastic pipes set in a radial pattern. Its basically a giant tinker toy hub made of cement. At […]
HERA Prescott – Cement. lots of cement Read More »
When building any kind of instrument its really important for the people looking at the data to understand all the little things that go into building it and from an experimental perspective its key to be able to experiment with the hardware. With the primary construction going on in South Africa this is a challenge. Travel to site is key,
Last week the ECHO team took the (relatively) short drive from Tempe up to Prescott, Arizona and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University to do some more testing at a new location. The Embry-Riddle Physics department has put together a very nice campus observatory which is predominantly devoted to radio science, both astronomy and aerospace. Under the leadership of Professor Andri
First map of MWA tile! Read More »
Onward to 32! This month we added another shipment of 16 antenna to bring PAPER to 32 antennae. The arrangement of the antennae on the ground is very close to random, making geography tricky! I spent a good amount of time out there with the GPS pole and pack, marking out locations of antennae. We
PAPER 2010 Deployment Read More »
I’ve just returned from building the first 16 antenna section of PAPER in South Africa. The site is in the northern part of the country in the middle of the Karoo desert. With its brown sandy dirt and scrub brush the desert is much like middle New Mexico and felt just like home! Here is
PAPER 2009 Deployment Read More »
