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Real time analyser (RTA) – a Brief history
Real time analyser (RTA) – a Brief history
2011 RTA1 (Ratty) was born out of a real life requirement and used leading edge technology that was developed for the radio telescope
2012 / 2013 RTA2 (Ratty2) was a technology development program to develop a real time analyser (Time and frequency domains) based on the ROACH2 architecture
2014-2015: RTA3 was the first 3 units produced under the financial assistance program, this was then upgraded in 2016 to RTA3.5 version and used by the RFI teams as flagship RFI receivers at:
A mobile unit
Fixed monitoring station at the ASC
Fixed monitoring station at HERA
2021: RTA3.6 is the next batch of 10x production units with the maximum frequency band extend to cover S-band and improved filters
RTA4 is the future with the top end frequency extended to around 15 GHz – Initial design study done (2017 & 2018), but this project still needs to be formally launched
RTA1 (Ratty) – Developed by Jason Manley from the CBF team to do time domain detections of electric fence pulses.
RATTY used the ROACH2 FPGA boards that were developed under the CASPIR collaboration and used for early correlators such as PAPER and KAT-7.
Photo of Jason doing debugging in the field and Paul from MESA waiting patiently.
This was the start of great things to come!
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