My last week in South Africa was hectic but successful. Making one last trip to HartRAO, we attached the two focus modules that I brought from Toronto on two of the dishes (shown on the left in the first picture), and set the telescopes looking at a bright pulsar in the sky, Vela. To keep the electronics protected from the elements, we put weather-proof enclosures over top of them (i.e. plastic salad bowls). You can see them in the picture on the right — they fit over the focus modules perfectly! For the other two dishes, we are planning to use different colours for the other enclosures to add some more rainbow colour to the telescope.
You can see the clover-leaf antenna in the picture on the right, on the opposite side of the can as the focus module. In the picture below, all four of our dishes are shown; two of them have focus modules attached, with Cynthia tying up some of the last cables running to the dish.
After some finagling of the FPGA board, we were able to take data and to confirm that our focus modules were working! I included a plot below (because I’m very proud of it) — the gist of it is that four inputs are hooked up the the FPGA board and have actual signal (the top four data curves on the plot), and the other twelve are just noise.
Seeing as how HartRAO is in the middle of nowhere about an hour outside of Johannesburg, we decided try one of a couple local restaurants while we were there (celebratory for setting up two focus modules). In the picture below, Jon is enjoying South African Mexican cuisine (it wasn’t the best, to say the least). Not to dwell on this too much, but apparently they used BBQ sauce. Generous helpings of Tabasco sauce were needed.
Since we had a bit of time, one last thing I did was put together a special antenna that was sent from another team at West Virginia University. I threw together another focus module for this antenna with extra amplifiers that we had, and we set this antenna up on a third dish. Before we left HartRAO, we had data coming from all three dishes!
I had a great time in South Africa, and can happily say that I think our trip was a success! We’ve kick-started the building of the HIRAX prototype (a total of eight dishes are planned to be set up this summer), and we also had a great time enjoying the culture and the landscape of SA.
Symbolically, on the last day of my stay in Durban, a butterfly landed beside my breakfast.
Durban was beautiful, and I hope to visit again someday!
🙂 Deborah
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