Receiver Overview
For maximum linearity of response, the MWA will use a direct RF sampling receiver architecture. The receiver consists of all components between the RF output of the analog antenna tile beamformer, and a high spectral resolution (8 kHz) digital data stream transmitted to the central processing facility. In this case, the "F" part of the "FX" correlator architecture becomes part of the receiver. The receiver consists of two parts. The front end is a small analog & mixed-signal board consisting of a single fixed low-pass and sky-noise equalization filter, final amplifier, and fast A/D converter sampling RF in the 1st Nyquist zone (the 6-bit Maxim MAX105 and the 8-bit National ADC081000 are currently under evaluation and testing). The back end is a purely digital part implementing coarse spectral filtering, decimation to a selected 32 MHz subset, final spectral filtering to 4K channels of 8 kHz resolution, and aggregation of signals for fiber transport to the central processing facility.
Details of the receiver and clock architecture can be found here.
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