Speaker
Description
The SKA-MPIfR telescope (SKAMPI) is a 15-meter prototype antenna for the SKA-Mid located at the SKA site in the Karoo Desert, South Africa. Funded by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) and operated togetherwith SARAO (South African Radio Astronomy Observatory). For this telescope, the MPIfR backend development team implemented a novel VLBI backend. In the near future, SKAMPI will serve as a science and technology testbed for the SKA era, including SKA-VLBI science. In particular, SKAMPI is a key instrument for demonstrations of technical and operational VLBI readiness of new and upgraded stations on African soil, including the SKA-Mid. SKAMPI is therefore in the vanguard of new telescopes in Africa that will make the African VLBI Network (AVN) a reality. In this talk, I will present the first fringe detections at S-band tests with the Australian Long Baseline Array as part of the TANAMI program. TANAMI is a multi-wavelength observing program monitoring the relativistic jets of Active Galactic Nuclei in the southern sky. We conclude with a discussion of potential AVN baselines and the new software implemented for SKAMPI's novel backend
