Received (to be inserted by publisher); Revised (to be inserted by publisher); Accepted (to be inserted by publisher);The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has been working for a decade to reduce the time and cost of designing, building and deploying new digital radio-astronomy instruments.Today, CASPER open-source technology powers over 45 scientific instruments worldwide, and is used by scientists and engineers at dozens of academic institutions. In this paper we catalog the current offerings of the CASPER collaboration, and instruments past and present built by CASPER users and developers. We describe the ongoing state of software development, as CASPER looks to support a broader range of programming environments and hardware and ensure compatibility with the latest vendor tools.

Traditional Walsh technique is used to eliminate cross-talk in a array of radio telescope where achieving synchronization between modulator and demodulator without compromising sensitivity is a real challenge. The paper describes a novel approach named Walsh Delay Hunting (WDH) to synchronize independently running modulator and demodulator with no additional hardware. This approach is unique and can easily be implemented in any existing radio telescope with minimal changes, thus by putting Walsh modulator at telescope and demodulation can be done in digital back-end. The scheme greatly reduces antenna electronics and overhead of sending synchronizing Walsh start pulse back to center station and vice versa. The paper describes WDH method and its feasibility study for Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) along with test results. The modulator is a low cost CPLD-based module and demodulation is done in a Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware (ROACH)-based digitizer and packetizer. The scheme requires noise injection facility before modulator, which GMRT has for antenna calibration.

No abstract