On the instrumentation of the Omniscope

Abstract

An emergent technique known as 21-cm tomography has the potential to become the most sensitive tool we have for probing the early universe. It is expected to shed light on some of the most pressing questions in modern physics-such as the nature of dark matter. However, there are significant technical challenges involved in developing an instrument capable of 21-cm tomography. Radio telescopes are particularly well suited to the task. However, the cost of scaling a traditional radio telescope to achieve the necessary sensitivity is prohibitive. The Omniscope is an elegant solution to this problem. It is a new type of radio telescope that scales significantly better than traditional large array telescopes by using an innovative computational framework. I detail the implementation of many of the major subsystems of one of the very first Omniscopes ever built-including the digital correlator, the direct sequence spread spectrum channel encoding system and powerful system and data analysis software.