The Front End Lab is in the business of receivers: maintaining
the current VLA receivers, and designing and building new EVLA
receivers. The new receivers will receive a much broader band so that
astronomers will have all frequencies between 1-50 GHz available for
their use.
The receivers are designed by engineers in Socorro. Our drafters
make the technical drawings and send them to the machine shop to be
rendered. Occasionally parts will be outsourced or bought
off-the-shelf. Amplifiers are built by the CDL in
Charlottesville.
Paul is working on
the design for the EVLA L-band receiver-not everything is done on the
computer-sometimes they have to resort to a pencil and paper!
Lisa is modeling a feedhorn for the
C-band receiver, beginning with the "small" end. Her main project is
the design of an orthomode transducer. It fits inside the dewar,
between the feed horn and receiver, and must extract both
polarizations out of the horn to the low noise amplifiers.
Dave is repairing an ailing receiver.
Darrell is looking over a parts list for the AC
relay box. He needs 25 parts and will order enough to build 50
boxes.
The "boxes" are purchased empty.
The EVLA Front End Lab fills them. On the left are two of the
empties. On the right, the AC relay box is the one on the top. Below
it is the post-amp box that establishes the band-width and provides
additional signal amplification.
National Radio
The "boxes" are purchased empty.
The EVLA Front End Lab fills them. On the left are two of the
empties. On the right, the AC relay box is the one on the top. Below
it is the post-amp box that establishes the band-width and provides
additional signal amplification.