Practical Interferometry

• What is an interferometer?
  • How does an array make images?
  • Building up an image from individual interferometer baseline responses.
• Basic 2D Fourier Transform relation between visibility and image planes
  • Examples of FT's
  • Choosing the correct baseline range
• Antennas and the primary beam
• Basic receiver concepts:
  • amplifier,
  • mixer,
  • bandwidth,
  • IF conversion,
  • digitisation
• What is a correlator?
  • How are spectra produced
• Sampling;
  • dirty beam as the FT of the sampling function;
  • gridding
• Deconvolution
• Introduction to existing and near-future arrays from 10 MHz - 1000 GHz.