First summator!

Almost first light! On November 11th 2011 we installed the first two summators into the HBA panels with the idea that these can be used to test the signal processing hardware inside the RF container. These summators were the first from the newly designed batch of summators produced by Astron, hopefully fixing some of the problems with moisture that were experienced with the old version. The wintering of these newly designed summators will also be a test of their durability as well. 

We are still missing 46 summators before the system is fully operational. However, we will have to wait until spring 2012, as it isn't possible to perform the installation during winter due to increased risk of static electricity discharge and pure inconvenience. 

The green cables seen inside the HBA tile are connected to the summator, which is responsible for the first level of coarse grained beam forming, implemented using a set of switchable delay lines.    

Installing the summators.