Dual 4-Meter L-Band Radio Interferometer

Two-element interferometer for L-band radio astronomy and pulsar timing

Overview

A two-dish, 4-meter L-band interferometer intended as a baseline instrument for radio astronomy, pulsar timing, and eventually contributing timing data toward pulsar-timing-array style gravitational-wave detection at the low-frequency end. Amateur radio license KN4ABK covers the RF operating side.

Architecture

• Two 4-meter parabolic dishes, spaced to set interferometric baseline and resolution at L-band
• L-band feed and LNA front end per dish, matched for the target frequency window
• Correlator stage to combine the two signal paths into interferometric fringe data
• Local oscillator distribution shared across both dishes for phase coherence
• Data acquisition pipeline feeding into standard radio-astronomy timing/analysis tooling

Open questions

• Final baseline separation and mount design for the two dishes
• Correlator implementation: software-defined vs. dedicated hardware
• Site RFI characterization at the Appalachian land site