Digitizing MEXART — system overview and verification

Abstract

The Mexican Array Radio Telescope (MEXART), located in the state of Michoacan in Mexico, has been operating in an analog fashion, utilizing a Butler Matrix to generate fixed beams on the sky, since its inception. Calibrating this instrument has proved difficult, leading to loss in sensitivity. It was also a rigid setup, requiring manual intervention and tuning for different observation requirements. The Radio Frequency (RF) system has now been replaced with a digital one. This digital backend is a hybrid system utilizing both FPGA-based technology and GPU acceleration, and is capable of automatically calibrating the different rows of the array, as well as generating a configurable number of frequency-domain synthesized beams to towards selected locations on the sky. A monitoring and control system, together with a full-featured web-based front-end, has also been developed, greatly simplifying the interaction with the instrument. This paper presents the design, implementation and deployment of the new digital backend, including preliminary analysis of system performance and stability.