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The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) Project

The Expanded VLA (EVLA) project modernized the VLA electronics (built in the 1970s and 1980s) in order to improve several key observational parameters by an order of magnitude or more.  Some of the details of the EVLA Project may be found at http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/evla/.   The EVLA project was funded jointly by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Canadian National Research Council, and the CONACyT funding agency in Mexico.   Total funding was approximately $94 million in Year 2006 dollars, including $59 million in new NSF funding, $16 million in redistributed effort from the NRAO Operations budget, $17 million for the correlator from Canada, and $2 million from Mexico.

The EVLA project was completed on time and on budget at the end of 2012, 11 years after it began.  Its key observational goals were (1) complete frequency coverage from 1 to 50 GHz; (2) continuum sensitivity improvement by up to an order of magnitude (nearly two orders of magnitude in speed) by increasing the bandwidth from the VLA's 100 MHz per polarization to 8 GHz per polarization; and (3) implementation of a new correlator capable of processing the large bandwidth with a minimum of 16,384 spectral channels per baseline.  All goals were met.   A comparison of some of the EVLA performance parameters with those of the original VLA is provided in Table 1.

Note: The "Factor" gives the factor by which the EVLA parameter improves on the equivalent VLA parameter.

VLA to EVLA transition

The correlator that was the heart of the VLA for three decades was decommissioned on 11 January, 2010, and replaced with the new EVLA "WIDAR" correlator.  The VLA was shut down to outside users until March 2010, during which time hardware was transferred from the old correlator to the EVLA correlator and observing modes commissioned in preparation for EVLA early science. At the same time the direction of the configuration cycles also changed, from A→B→C→D→A to D→C→B→A→D, in order to facilitate the EVLA correlator commissioning and to limit initial EVLA data rates. The last VLA antenna was retrofitted to EVLA specifications in May 2010.

The first full configuration cycle of early science using the EVLA correlator saw up to 256 MHz of bandwidth offered to the general community, and 2 GHz bandwidth for observers willing to visit Socorro to help with EVLA commissioning.  By the end of 2011, at the start of the second configuration cycle, up to 2 GHz bandwidth was offered to the general community.  This increased to 8 GHz at the start of full operations in semester 2013A.

 

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