| Description: | The beautiful telescope in the above image is the new Kunming 40-m radio telescope, which is located on the Phoenix Mountain just east of the Kunming city, Yunnan Province, P.R. China (longitude: 102d47'42", latitude: 25d01'33", altitude: 1985 m). On 17 Jun 2009, the Kunming telescope participated in the EVN network monitoring experiment N09SX1 for the first time. We successfully detected fringes to this new member of the network from a number of EVN telescopes. The small inset image shows the interferometric ftp-test *fringe* on the baseline Kunming -- Effelsberg (7728 km). With the Kunming telescope, the EVN u-v coverage is improved considerably, especially on the long baselines.
At the end of May 2006, the Kunming 40-m radio telescope started its work with a dual-frequency S/X VLBI observing system consisted of a cooled RCP receiver, a VLBA formatter, 8 BBCs, a MK5A recorder and an H-Maser. The telescope successfully tracked the Chinese ChangE-1 lunar satellite and received its downlink data in 2007 - 2008. A MK5B+ and a Chinese digital data acquisition system (similar to DBBC) have been installed recently. In addition to VLBI observations, the Yunnan Observatory staff is now trying to perform pulsar observations. More information of the Kunming 40-m radio telescope can be provided by Longfei Hao (haolongfei@ynao.ac.cn) - who was a trainee here at JIVE and ASTRON several years ago. |
