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by jacquesm 146 days ago
Right, that makes sense, you'd be looking at an insane amount of data across the ranges that these sensors can look at. But they would still need to preserve phase information if they want to use the array for what it is best at and that alone is a massive amount of data.
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touisteur 146 days ago
I think they preserve timestamped I,Q data. Know some people looking at down-sampling, preselecting those signals for longer term storage and deeper reprocessing and they seem to have a 24h window to 'analyze and keep what you need'.

We're still in technological phase where ADCs are far more advanced than storage and online processing systems, which means throwing away a lot. But I have high hopes for a system where you upgrade computing, network, storage (and maybe ADCs...) and you get an improved sensor. Throw man-hours at some GPU kernel developers and you get new science. The limit seems more now about enough people and compute to fully exploit the data than technological...

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jacquesm 146 days ago
Too late to edit: any idea of the resolution that the I,Q data is sampled at (bandwidth, bit depth)? I've been in one of these installations a while ago and the tourguide had really no clue about any of the details (I think he was the son of one of the scientists)?
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touisteur 146 days ago
Remembering now that SKA is many, many things and I was talking of the higher-bands array still being installed, but many infos on the -low and -mid arrays are available, for example https://www.skao.int/sites/default/files/documents/Year_In_T...
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jacquesm 146 days ago
That's an incredible resource, thank you again. I've been reading for the last hour and it is only getting better.

This is also an interesting development:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Frequency_Array

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jacquesm 146 days ago
Fascinating stuff, thank you for the details and the view of a possible path forward.
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touisteur 136 days ago
BTW if you're interested in the concept of upgrading a sensor without retooling the RF part, and the impact of 'just' putting new COTS racked server hardware and engineering man-hours to get a 'new' sensor with new capabilities, have a look at Julien Plante's work on NenuFAR (which isn't like the SKA at all :-) : https://cnrs.hal.science/USN/obspm-04273804v1 . Damien Gratadour, his PhD supervisor is an amazing technologist, dedicated to improving astronomy instruments, and I was very lucky to work with him and his team... the things the French can string together with small teams and thin budgets...
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