Instrumentation and Calibration of the Transient Array Radio Telescope

Abstract

The Transient Array Radio Telescope (TART) is a 24-element aperture synthesis array radio telescope. It is designed as a low-cost test bench for hardware, calibration, and imaging algorithm development, as well as a survey-instrument for transient events. The TART is an all-sky telescope and supports continuous real-time imaging with an angular resolution of 3 degrees operating at 1.57542 GHz with a narrow bandwidth of 2.5 MHz. This thesis gives a detailed overview of the instrument and the process of calibration. The developed telescope’s Web-based REST-ful application programming interface (API) allows remote operation, imaging and data analysis via the Internet, either with a browser-based front end, or with command line tools.