The wideband backend at the MDSCC in Robledo. A new facility for radio
  astronomy at Q- and K- bands
  The antennas of NASA's Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex (MDSCC) in
Robledo de Chavela are available as single-dish radio astronomical facilities
during a significant percentage of their operational time. Current
instrumentation includes two antennas of 70 and 34 m in diameter, equipped with
dual-polarization receivers in K (18 - 26 GHz) and Q (38 - 50 GHz) bands,
respectively. We have developed and built a new wideband backend for the
Robledo antennas, with the objectives (1) to optimize the available time and
enhance the efficiency of radio astronomy in MDSCC; and (2) to tackle new
scientific cases impossible to that were investigated with the old, narrow-band
autocorrelator. The backend consists of an IF processor, a FFT spectrometer
(FFTS), and the software that interfaces and manages the events among the
observing program, antenna control, the IF processor, the FFTS operation, and
data recording. The whole system was end-to-end assembled in August 2011, at
the start of commissioning activities, and the results are reported in this
paper. Frequency tunings and line intensities are stable over hours, even when
using different synthesizers and IF channels; no aliasing effects have been
measured, and the rejection of the image sideband was characterized. The first
setup provides 1.5 GHz of instantaneous bandwidth in a single polarization,
using 8192 channels and a frequency resolution of 212 kHz; upgrades under way
include a second FFTS card, and two high-resolution cores providing 100 MHz and
500 MHz of bandwidth, and 16384 channels. These upgrades will permit
simultaneous observations of the two polarizations with instantaneous
bandwidths from 100 MHz to 3 GHz, and spectral resolutions from 7 to 212 kHz.
