OSL, St Ives, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
SKAO, Macclesfield, United Kingdom
CSIRO, Clayton, Australia
VIVO, Somerset West, South Africa
The Power and Signal Distribution System (PaSD) is a key component of the SKA-Low telescope, responsible for control and monitoring of local power to the electronic components of the RF signal chain for the antennas, and collecting the RF signals for transmission to the Central Processing Facility. The system comprises "SMART boxes" (SMART: Small Modular Aggregation and RFoF Trunk) which each connect directly to around 10 antennas to provide local monitoring and control, and one Field Node Distribution Hub (FNDH) per station which distributes power to all the SMART boxes and provides a communications gateway as well as additional local monitoring. All communication to the SMART boxes is funnelled through the FNDH on a multi-drop serial bus using the Modbus ASCII protocol. This paper will describe how the PaSD will be integrated into the Tango-based SKA-Low Monitoring Control and Calibration Subsystem (MCCS) software, including the facility for a drop-in Python simulator which can be used to test the software.
