MeerKAT

The first phase of the MeerKAT radio telescope [4] has been installed on the Karoo site. This phase includes all 64 antennas fitted with L-band receivers and digitizers, signal and data transfer systems, time and frequency reference, the correlator/beamformer hardware, control software, and science data processing hardware and software, Not all of the functionality required to execute the eight large scale projects (LSPs) that have been prioritized is available at the moment, but commissioning and test observations have been conducted using the L-band receivers and the first correlater/beamformer firmware releases. Test images of the Galactic Centre, the Galactic Plane and deep extragalactic fields indicate that all of the telescope subsystems are functioning correctly, and specifically that the analog and digital signal paths (including the dish optics) are operating operating within specification. The sensitivity of the L-band instrument is twice that initially specified in the call for large survey projects [1].