Design and Implementation of a Digital Observation Terminal for Solar Radio Observation within the 800MHz-975MHz Band

The 10m solar radio telescope of the Yunnan Observatories (at the Phoenix Mountain) is an important observational equipment of solar radio physics in China. With its original design, the radio telescope did not work properly in the 800MHz-975MHz band because of the interference of mobile phones. In recent years, with the enhancement of the technological specifications of microwave devices and digital components, and with the change of the operation bands of mobile phones, solar radio observation with the telescope in this important band becomes feasible. In this paper we propose real-time signal acquisition/processing methods for the solar radio observation using the telescope in the 800MHz-975MHz band based on the FPGA and Gigabit-Ethernet technologies. The pipeline of the system in which we implement the methods adopts the Verilog hardware description language, so that it has achieved data transmission through a Gigabit Ethernet and has improved the data-transmission efficiency. We have obtained real-time solar radio spectra through this system. In addition, the system incorporates time-sharing transmission mechanisms, which allow the Gigabit-Ethernet UDP packet transmission. We finally present the error analysis of outputs of the system as well as results of certain tests of the system. These show the accuracy and reliability of the proposed real-time methods.