Both 26-m radio telescopes point and track at sidereal or user-defined rates for astronomical observations. The control system is built by DFM Engineering, Inc. The 26-m radio telescopes use position encoders with 18-bit resolution and the addition of dual 15 HP computer controlled synchro motors on each axis.  PARI has conducted pointing model measurements to ensure pointing accuracy to within a fraction of a beamwidth.

Spectrometers
We have five scanning spectrometers and two 64 Msps FFT spectrometers.

• The scanning spectrometers are 15kHz filter bandwidth with +/-2 MHz maximum scan range around a 70 MHz center frequency. Integration times are 0.3, 1, or 10 seconds in either continuum or spectrum mode. In continuum mode the noise bandwidth is 10 MHz. Sweep width can be narrowed around the predicted shift frequency. Rest frequency correction is available to precisely recenter any error in the 1420.405 MHz to 70.00 MHz downconversion.
• The 64 Msps spectrometer [ SDR-14 www.rfspace.com ] has a variety of modes that allow input frequencies in nyquist mode at 0-30 MHz input or 0-230 MHz in undersampled downconversion mode. We normally use it with an Icom R8500 receiver as the front end downconverter. This radio's IF is 10.7 MHz with several MHz of bandwidth for input to the SDR-14. This part of the system also is used for interference resolution. The receiver has been modified to allow external referencing to our GPS time/frequency system or our Rubidium standard. This allows more spectral resolution than we need (sub-Hz) with FFT sizes from 2048 to 262,144 point. The spectrometer also has a realtime mode that allows lossless recording of a 140 kHz portion of any frequency range direct to hard drive. This allows later post processing or evaluation of the spectrum in the time or frequency domain since it is stored in complex I-Q format.
• The second 64 Msps spectrometer is called a Universal Serial Radio Peripheral (USRP) [ http://comsec.com/wiki?UniversalSoftwareRadioPeripheral ]. This spectrometer is a flexible platform for software development. It contains multiple channels of 12-bit digitization and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to provide fast on-board manipulation of data as required. This will allow interferometry and pulsar signal processing algorithms to be accomplished directly in the USRP instead of inside a much slower PC.

Downconverters
Most downconversion on site is currently crystal controlled. In critical applications we have used PTS-160 synthesizers to substitute for crystal oscillators. This also allows locking to the 10 MHz reference. The East 26m antenna is currently configured at 327 MHz for Pulsar research. Dr. David Moffet at Furman University is the PI on that effort. This is the only frequency that has both polarizations instrumented currently. System noise temperature is around 50K.

IF's

26 East is currently configured for 327 MHz pulsar research.