Preliminary Designs for an Internet Based Antenna Array
Draft Design
The first steps to development of an array system are specification
of science goals and technological feasibility study.
A major motivation of the project is to allow independent student groups
to use the individual telescope elements for science education goals.
A science and engineering curriculum must be developed simultaneously.
A first draft science and technology document is
available in PDF format.
Related Projects
The science goals of the Internet Antenna are similar to those
for the proposed Low Frequency Array
(LOFAR and
LWA)
projects.
The proposed
International Square Kilometer Array also has a distributed
network of antennas, but will operate at higher frequencies.
Rick Fisher,
of NRAO Green Bank, is working on a number of related topics
in beam forming and noise cancellation technology.
The development work of Gie Han Tan and Christof Rohner
on "The Low Frequency Array active antenna system" is
potentially very valuable for the Internet Array Element design
( postscript,
pdf).
NRAO
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory
(NRAO) is
a facility of the
National Science Foundation
operated under cooperative agreement with the
Associated Universities, Inc.
glangsto@nrao.edu Last update: 2003 March 18