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On Wednesday 22 April, the Smart Back-end group organised its annual SBe day! It was a long day, filled with useful discussions, followed by some serious engineering.

We kicked off the day with a discussion about AI and a brainstorm session to select related topics that we should include on our technology roadmap. Many interesting ideas came up, ranging from adaptive signal processing to agentic research assistants. You may see the topics back on the technology roadmap.

After the intensive brainstorm session, followed by a much needed lunch at Hotel Westerburcht, we visited our offices in Westerbork. Here we set out to create a radio telescope (front to back-end), following in the footsteps of our SDCO colleagues, who built cantennas (paint can feeds) in 2023. We used Michiel's recipe to create these cantennas to observe HI, but we couldn't just do the exact same activity again, so we turned it up a notch and also set out to master the art of building an entire radio dish. Since we have over 20 well-trained (software) engineers, we did not stop at one dish but built two.

To accomplish this enormous feat, we split up in a few teams covering back-end, front-end, and mechanical aspects of the telescope. The back-end group focused on the software and the front-end team was busy soldering and carefully calibrating the feeds (cantennas), while the mechanical group was building dishes out of blood, sweat, tears, chicken wire, an umbrella and aluminium foil. We successfully detected the neutral hydrogen line with and without both dishes. For the umbrella telescope, the HI-line was clearer with the dish than without, which is a clear sign that the cantenna was close to a focal point. For the chicken wire telescope, there was a hydrogen line detection, but not as strong as with the feed alone looking up, demonstrating that we need better than 15cm surface accuracy.

All in all, it was a super fun day with a lovely sunny afternoon; truly perfect weather for building a telescope! And as highlight of the day: the aluminium foil umbrella telescope outperformed our wildest expectations.