ICALEPCS2023 - List of Authors (Ngcebetsha, B.)

Paper	Title	Page
TUPDP068	Implementation of External Delay Calculator to MeerKAT	658
	B. Ngcebetsha SARAO, Cape Town, South Africa
	The MeerKAT is an interferometric array made up of 64 dishes that operate as a unit. The very first corrections that must be made to the incoming signal is that of geometric and cable length delays, collectively called "delays". In summary, this is the adjustment of the time of arrival of the signal at the correlator from all 64 antennas, to operate as one instrument. The signal must be recorded at the same time. The MeerKAT correlator has inbuilt a delay correction mechanism, which records and applies these corrections during observation. In this paper we describe how this solution was evolved when ‘katpoint‘(the underlying library to which the delay corrections dependend) had a change in dependencies itself. There were two major changes to ‘katpoint‘ 1) changing from ‘ephem‘ to ‘astropy‘ for time and location calculations of a telescope and celestial bodies, and 2) the move from python2 to python3. Most of the Control and Monitoring(CAM) codebase was still using python2 at the time. Our team had the mamoth task of porting all the codebase from ‘py2‘ to ‘py3‘. This presented unexpected issues, particularly in our case - as we wanted to retain Python2 - Python3 backward compatibility. In this paper we explore the challenges faced when ‘katpoint‘ started to implement ‘astropy‘ which is implemented in Python3 whist the rest of our code was still in Python2. The technical benefit of this improvement was an improvement in the astrometry for delay calculations which will improve the MeerKAT science images.
	Poster TUPDP068 [2.970 MB]
DOI •	reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TUPDP068
About •	Received ※ 04 October 2023 — Revised ※ 19 October 2023 — Accepted ※ 11 December 2023 — Issued ※ 14 December 2023
Cite •	reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)

Paper

Title

Page

Implementation of External Delay Calculator to MeerKAT

658

B. Ngcebetsha
SARAO, Cape Town, South Africa

The MeerKAT is an interferometric array made up of 64 dishes that operate as a unit. The very first corrections that must be made to the incoming signal is that of geometric and cable length delays, collectively called "delays". In summary, this is the adjustment of the time of arrival of the signal at the correlator from all 64 antennas, to operate as one instrument. The signal must be recorded at the same time. The MeerKAT correlator has inbuilt a delay correction mechanism, which records and applies these corrections during observation. In this paper we describe how this solution was evolved when ‘katpoint‘(the underlying library to which the delay corrections dependend) had a change in dependencies itself. There were two major changes to ‘katpoint‘ 1) changing from ‘ephem‘ to ‘astropy‘ for time and location calculations of a telescope and celestial bodies, and 2) the move from python2 to python3. Most of the Control and Monitoring(CAM) codebase was still using python2 at the time. Our team had the mamoth task of porting all the codebase from ‘py2‘ to ‘py3‘. This presented unexpected issues, particularly in our case - as we wanted to retain Python2 - Python3 backward compatibility. In this paper we explore the challenges faced when ‘katpoint‘ started to implement ‘astropy‘ which is implemented in Python3 whist the rest of our code was still in Python2. The technical benefit of this improvement was an improvement in the astrometry for delay calculations which will improve the MeerKAT science images.

Poster TUPDP068 [2.970 MB]

DOI •

reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TUPDP068

About •

Received ※ 04 October 2023 — Revised ※ 19 October 2023 — Accepted ※ 11 December 2023 — Issued ※ 14 December 2023

Cite •

reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)