First fringes for the Sardinia Radio Telescope

Fringes were found in an interferometric observation done on 27 January 2014 between the Sardinia Radio Telescope and the Medicina 32m dish of 3C454.3 at 22GHz. These are the first fringes found with the SRT, a 64m dish inaugurated in September 2013. The observation was affected by bad weather condition at the SRT site.

The data correlation was performed by the DiFX correlator installed at the Institute of Radioastronomy, Bologna, Italy. New tests are scheduled for the coming European VLBI Network session in February at several wavelengths, namely 18cm, 5cm, and 1.3cm. The future participation of SRT to regular EVN observations will greatly improve the capability of the network.