Things are hotting up in Chilbolton - and I mean more than just the weather. The "army" of volunteer scientists, complete with fully trained "Lieutenants" and its very own "Field Marshall", descends next week to install the LBAs. You can expect lots of updates, including (we hope) some live tweeting from the installation. Of course Chilbolton is a good location for a LOFAR station partly because it has low levels of radio interference. This is good for a radio telescope, not good for mobile phone reception. The LOFAR station is also being built in a field some distance from the main Chilbolton Observatory building... but we'll do our best....
As a way to track the LBA installation we're planning daily updates of the number of antennas completed. Every day we will post a new version of the schematic shown below where completed antennas will be coloured in - using rainbow order to illustrate the time sequence. As you can see, at present there are three LBAs in the field - two done during "Lieutenant" training last week (shown in red) and one more which was put up today as a final check of the procedure (coloured in orange).
So that's 3 down, 93 to go...
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