Daily Image
17-07-2023
Scaling up towards LOFAR2.0!
| Submitter: | The LOFAR2.0 Station team |
| Description: | A very important step in the LOFAR2.0 Station development project is to have a full station operating with the new hardware. This will serve as a blueprint for all other stations and will allow us to test out all aspects that are important for the LOFAR2.0 station, such as heat production and cooling, switching components on and off, cross-talk between subracks, stability of clocks and PLLs, etc. To a large extent we have already tested these aspects in the limited LOFAR2.0 test setup that we put in CS001 last year, but not yet at the scale of a fully equipped LOFAR2.0 station. So, after months of preparations by the LOFAR2.0 Station development team, the day finally arrived that we were ready to upgrade the limited LOFAR2.0 Test Station to a full LOFAR2.0 station. The team prepared the three prototype subracks, which allows all LBA and HBA antennas to be connected and all signal chains in the station to be activated. The rollout to CS001 was originally planned for Wednesday July 5th. Unfortunately, we had to wait for another day as storm Poly caused major havoc in The Netherlands that day. But then, on Thursday July 6th, the weather was really nice again and the rollout team, consisting of Gijs Schoonderbeek, Sjouke Kuindersma, Jeroen Herrewijnen and Menno Norden, went out to remove the former test subrack from CS001. They replaced it with the new subracks, added new power supplies, connected all antenna cables, power cables and network cables and carefully powered up the station again. The first measurement results show that the newly placed equipment is working. This marks the start of a weeks-long period of extensive testing to find out if the current designs meets the requirements at the scale of a full station. Exciting times are ahead for the team! |
| Copyright: | ASTRON |
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