A brief overview of activities at the Raman Research Institute

In this presentation I will give a brief overview of the on-going activities at Raman Research Institute (RRI). The present focus at RRI is on aperture arrays for low frequency radio astronomy. Appreciating the fact that SKA design will use the aperture array technology up to 1.4GHz, RRI has initiated design studies related to aperture phase array technology. The talk will describe the present status of the design of wide band antenna elements, LNAs, digital receivers with 2 GHz digitizers and a verification program centered on a 144 tile system. Based on these developments, we propose to build a compact aperture array; A Low Frequency All Sky Transient Telescope, with a 10% collecting area of SKA dedicated to studying transients. We are targeting the frequency range 0.1 to 1 GHz. This is an order of magnitude larger than the collecting area of SKA pathfinders / demonstrators which are in different phases at present.