© ASTRON

As a part of the LOFAR2.0 commissioning efforts, we're double checking a lot of the fundamentals to make sure we start the new era on the right foot. As a part of this, from Array Release C onwards we are looking at the field-of-view of our stations from the 1-s beamformed dataproducts produced by the station.

In the animation above, you can see the power observed by the station with a line of fixed azimuthal beams near Cassiopeia A's transit location after deploying new calibration tables to the superterp and RS307. All of the stations are using their full compliment of LBA antenna, and groups of 24 HBA antenna (either per ear, or the inner tiles for RS307). Time samples are converted into sky coordinates, and samples within 5 degrees of the transit coordinate are plotted.

The LBA stations of the superterp are seen to have the same scintillation pattern in the power data over time (horizontal arcs), given the shared view through the ionosphere.

Overall, we found the LBAs have FoVs of 19.6(5) deg^2, and HBAs of 14.5(1.1) deg^2, with some variations due to disabled antennas in each station. All stations were found to be within uncertainty, or larger, than our requirement of a minimum of 12 deg^2 and 13 deg^2 per field at 60 MHz and 140 MHz, passing the requirement.