| Description: | With funding from a recently awarded NWO-M Invest grant, the ASTRON Smart Frontend group will design and deploy Ambient-L: a new high-sensitivity, energy efficient, ambient-temperature radio receiver for one of the Westerbork 25-metre radio dishes. The receiver will increase the available recording bandwidth eightfold, to 1000 MHz, increase the sensitivity and the robustness to radio-frequency interference, and will provide raw voltage (baseband) data for analysis at the highest-possible temporal and frequency resolution. Ambient-L can provide high-cadence observations of fast radio bursts (FRBs) and other transients including gamma-ray bursts, pulsars, OH masers, flare stars, and exoplanets. From a technical point-of-view, Ambient-L builds expertise in non-cryogenically cooled receivers for applications like large-N/small-D telescope arrays.
This image shows: a diagram of the signal chain (bottom); some of the prototype electronics, including the uncooled low-noise transistor to be used for the low-noise amplifier, assembled and tested at ASTRON (top, left); and an example FRB detection from current observations using Wb-RT1 (top, right). |
