Abstract:
High time resolution studies of pulsars require specialized instrumentation to counter the degradation in the quality and time resolution of their radio signals due to dispersion in the inter-stellar medium. The availability of cheap computer hardware in recent years has provided a new alternative to dedicated hardware based solutions used in the past for this purpose. In this paper, a comparison of old and modern instrumentation to obtain high time resolution data is presented and future trends in pulsar instrumentation are discussed. The salient features of Coherent On-line baseband receiver for astronomy (COBRA), a new digital receiver for pulsar observations at Jodrell Bank Observatory, are listed followed by a brief description of our benchmark code used for designing such systems.
