The NRAO in Green Bank has a receiver construction project underway for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.
A Technical Report has been prepared for the Preliminary Design Review and is available from the Technical Reviews page.
The project will produce a dual beam, dual polarization, cryogenic receiver covering 26 to 40 Gigahertz which may be used for continuum, spectral line, or VLBI observations on the GBT. The front-end will operate at the Gregorian focus, and will use cooled HFET amplifiers produced by the NRAO Central Development Labs.
This will be the one of a family of instruments that will exploit the scientific potential of the GBT in its high frequency range. This instrument will be a pseudo-correlation receiver similar to those built for the MAP project and to the 3mm receiver currently being built for the GBT.
The receiver was installed on the GBT for astronomical commissioning on October 1, 2004. Currently it provides four continuum data channels (pending arrival of the "Caltech Continuum Backend" under construction), and a single polarization from two feeds for spectral lines.
4March2005: Commissioning is essentially complete. External observers used the receiver for the first time during the night of 3-4March2005. In addition, we are proceeding with design of a new LO distribution module (which will allow use of four polarization channels from two feeds for spectral line work), and preparation for interface with the coming Caltech Backend. See the "Schedule" item in the Contents frame to the left.
For more information, please select items in the Contents frame to the left.