The TART telescope consists of three major components.
- Radio Front End Module
- Radio Hub Module
- Base Station
The radio front end is a low-noise radio that digitizes the incoming signal at a sample rate of 16.368 MHz. An external clock input is used to synchronize the sampling. A full tart telescope consists of 24 radio front end modules arranged into four 'Tiles'
A radio hub module controls six radio front ends. It is responsible for generating low-noise power, and removing jitter from the main system clock (generated from the base station). The radio hub distributes this clean clock to each of the radio front end modules. The data from each radio is converted to RS422 differential signaling and fed back down Cat-6 UTP cabling back to the basestation.
This image shows a radio hub with six radio front end modules mounted.
The basestation is responsible for three main tasks.
- Clock & Power Generation
- Data reception
- Data resynchronization and buffering
- Storage and Upload
The clock and power generation hardware is described in the pcb/base_station folder.
The data resynchronization and buffering is performed using an FPGA. The hardware and Verilog source for this are described int the folder FPGA.
The Data storage and upload are managed by a raspberry pi computer running Linux. The software for operating this computer is described in the software directory in the main TART folder.
