Abstract
Radio astronomy is a sub eld of the eld of astronomy that studies the radio frequency
part of the electromagnetic spectrum with the means of radio telescopes. To record and
analyse signals, high-performance Digital Signal Processing (DSP) equipment and techniques
are used. This technology makes use of customised complicated hardware and is
very specialised. In radio astronomy, objects are normally studied either with total power
(continuum) or by means of spectra. Thus, there exists the need to provide observations
of both simultaneously. This project investigates the combination of a radiometer and
spectrometer in one device where the total power of the signal can be determined with
conventional radiometer techniques and four spectral windows added to do spectroscopy
as well. This will be investigated on the CASPER (Collaboration for Astronomy Signal
Processing and Electronics Research) framework with the ROACH-2 (Recon gurable
Open Architecture Computing Hardware) FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). The
designed system was tested by means of simulations in Simulink, and the results of the
simulations helped to verify the results from the physical system. From the experimental
work it is clear that the system is working, with the four moveable windows with
1MHz bandwidth that can be shifted, as well as the wideband mode that is used for the
continuum observations.