Hoisting the antenna

© Peter Maat, Roel Witvers, Rick Kloosterman, Lesley Goudbeek

Even though many people are enjoying the summer holidays right now, work continues at ASTRON. At the R&D department, the nanophotonics group is building their optical beamforming test system inside the antenna test chamber. Before and after the DOME Symposium, the IBM Silicon Photonics optical beamforming chip has been analyzed and characterized (many thanks to the intern Rick Kloosterman).

In the picture, you can see a Vivaldi array (left), including many optical components and fibers (right), put back on a pedestal. The next step is to connect all the necessary equipment to the optical hardware and install the beamforming chip. So the following months can be spend to further test optical beamforming with the IBM chip.