The Westerbork Flexible Filterbank Backend

Abstract

The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) has recently been fitted with a new backend designed for pulsar detection. This backend is a filterbank with 32 channels, for both the X and Y polarised signals. A novel feature is that the channel bandwidths are digitally tunable between 6.25 kHz and 2.8 MHz (Vasisht et al. in preparation). The time constant of the integration which follows detection can be digitally set at values between circa 50 ms and 10 μS. For each observing frequency and each pulsar (with a known dispersion measure) we can choose an optimal bandwidth and signal smoothing.

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