[touisteur]

I think they preserve timestamped I,Q data. Know some people looking at down-sampling, preselecting those signals for longer term storage and deeper reprocessing and they seem to have a 24h window to 'analyze and keep what you need'.

We're still in technological phase where ADCs are far more advanced than storage and online processing systems, which means throwing away a lot. But I have high hopes for a system where you upgrade computing, network, storage (and maybe ADCs...) and you get an improved sensor. Throw man-hours at some GPU kernel developers and you get new science. The limit seems more now about enough people and compute to fully exploit the data than technological...

[jacquesm]

Too late to edit: any idea of the resolution that the I,Q data is sampled at (bandwidth, bit depth)? I've been in one of these installations a while ago and the tourguide had really no clue about any of the details (I think he was the son of one of the scientists)?

[touisteur]

Remembering now that SKA is many, many things and I was talking of the higher-bands array still being installed, but many infos on the -low and -mid arrays are available, for example https://www.skao.int/sites/default/files/documents/Year_In_T...

[jacquesm]

Fascinating stuff, thank you for the details and the view of a possible path forward.

[touisteur]

BTW if you're interested in the concept of upgrading a sensor without retooling the RF part, and the impact of 'just' putting new COTS racked server hardware and engineering man-hours to get a 'new' sensor with new capabilities, have a look at Julien Plante's work on NenuFAR (which isn't like the SKA at all :-) : https://cnrs.hal.science/USN/obspm-04273804v1 . Damien Gratadour, his PhD supervisor is an amazing technologist, dedicated to improving astronomy instruments, and I was very lucky to work with him and his team... the things the French can string together with small teams and thin budgets...