Hard and Software Tools for the Education of Geodetic VLBI

Other conference contribution, 2016

The Onsala Space Observatory hosts two 2.3 m radio telescopes called SALSA (”Such a lovely small antenna”) which are utilised to bring front-line interactive astronomy to the classroom. Until now SALSA has been used for astronomical educational purposes solely, in particular demonstrating the concept of single dish measurements. However, it is possible to combine both SALSAs to an interferometer by making use of hardware which has been developed for software-defined radio. In doing so, one can utilise the SALSA antenna pair as a student demonstrator for geodetic Very Long Baseline Interferometry. It is discussed which COTS hardware components are necessary to turn the SALSA installation into an interferometer. A simple Octave-based correlator has been written in order to process SALSA data. Results from a test run during which the Sun was tracked are presented and discussed here.