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03-02-2025
LOFAR2.0 is coming!
| Submitter: | Carla Baldovin |
| Description: | This year the LOFAR2.0 upgrade will become concrete, an incredible amount of work is ongoing to prepare, mostly invisible for most people in the building. But in the week of January 27, we reached a very important milestone: the integration of the Antenna Processing Subracks started. The Antenna Processing Subrack (APS) is where the signals coming out from the antennas are digitized and further processed. It contains the multiple components developed for LOFAR2.0 during the past years, each of them with its own technical challenges. In the Netherlands, each station (core and remote) will have three APS: two for the low-band and one for the high-band. International stations will have four APS: two for each low and high band. In total, we will integrate close to 200 APS in the coming months. A motivated team from I&S and A&O is working tirelessly in Westerbork, where we set up the integration and testing facility (ITF). All components are first tested at the manufacturer's location to identify any possible production errors. Only the products that pass the production tests are moved to the ITF where the testing aims at checking that all products are correctly mounted into the APS; the firmware is programmed and all connections between boards are functionally tested. Reaching this point took a great effort in preparation and planning; both for the work itself and for the scheduling of the deliveries of the different components from our production partners. Organizing the work and the logistics has been quite a puzzle and will remain a challenge throughout this process. The week started with some uncertainty, since one of the components was not delivered when expected. Luckily this was solved and eventually we could give the green light to start. It’s great to see the enthusiasm and motivation of the team! |
| Copyright: | Carla Baldovin on behalf of the amazing LOFAR2.0 team |
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