Radio Interferometer Telescope

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## Introduction

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This project deals with making a astronomical interferometer (a type of a radio telescope) based on the techniques of aperture synthesis. This telescope is designed to work at a radio frequency of 74 MHz.

The basic idea is to measure complex cross-correlation coefficients between voltage signals from two antennas separated by a distance,  b {\displaystyle b} . This technique, called interferometry, is used to obtain higher angular resolution, which may not be attainable due to modest sizes of individual antenna (or dishes) involved in observations.

## Methodology

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We plan to use half-wave dipole antennas to sense electromagnetic waves from astronomical sources at  74 {\displaystyle 74} MHz. This signal will be down-converted to  1.9 {\displaystyle 1.9} MHz using a mixer, after necessary amplification. A small band around 73.9 MHz, of about  0.25 {\displaystyle 0.25} MHz will be recorded using a direct-voltage recorder system. This raw, 2-bit quantized data will be stored on a PC for a later processing by customized computer programs.

These programs have been termed as `software correlator'. Our code for cross-correlation is based on lookup-table approach, details of which will be available on a separate page titled BITS Correlator.