Remote Station Architecture for LOFAR A.W. Gunst, G.W. Kant and C.M. de Vos;
ASTRON, The Netherlands.
Abstract: The LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) is a next generation radio telescope, operating in the low frequency window with a high spatial and spectral resolution. LOFAR consist of order 10000 antennas which are grouped per 100 in so called remote stations. The antennas within a remote station are combined by phased array techniques. The data of all the stations are correlated at a central location. This paper focuses on the architecture of a remote station.
Within a remote station a wide-band digital conversion architecture is used for digitising the received signals from the sky in a RFI hostile environment. For each antenna the digital signals are filtered in a filter bank. Subsequently all the antenna signals are combined in a beam former for each sub band. In this way a significant reduction of data is accomplished, before it is sent to the correlator.