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26-11-2010
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Pulsar correlation with the SFXC software correlator.

Submitter: Aard Keimpema and Mark Kettenis
Description: At JIVE we recently finished correlation of the first user experiment on the SFXC software correlator. This experiment was an astrometric VLBI pulsar observation at 5GHz, which uses the recently developed pulsar binning/gating feature of the correlator.

The idea behind pulsar gating is to increase signal/noise by only correlating the data when the pulsar is actually "on". By binning the correlated data based on the pulsar phase within the "gate" one can recover the pulse profile of the pulsar.

The image shows the pulsar profile for PSR 0329+54 at 1.4 GHz on the Jodrell Bank to Westerbork baseline as obtained from an earlier test observation. The sequence shows clearly how the pulse rises out of the noise if you keep integrating the gated signal. In the background is the SFXC cluster.
Copyright: JIVE
 
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