A fiber-optic reference signal transmission system, which transmits the 1.4 GHz reference signal from H-maser to receiver cabin in radio telescopes, was adopted for compensating the phase changes due to temperature variation and antenna movement. At the first experiment, the remote signal’s phase changed more than 15 degrees at 1.4 GHz. We found unstable components in sub-system experiments and replaced them. The main cause of unstable phase stability was the unaligned polarization axis between Laser Diode and Mach-Zehnder Modulator (MZM). The improved system stability showed 1 × 10-16 allan standard deviation at 1,000 sec integration time with the antenna fixed. When the antenna moves in the azimuth axis, the 1.4 GHz remote signal showed the phase change smaller than 0.2 degrees.

We have developed superconducting mixer receivers for 129 GHz VLBI observation in Korean VLBI Network (KVN). The developed mixer has a radial waveguide probe with simple transmission line L-C transformer as a tuning circuit to its 5 series-connected junctions, which can have 125 - 165 GHz as the operation radio frequency (RF). For intermediate frequency (IF) signal path a high impedance quarter-wavelength line connects the probe to one end of symmetric RF chokes. The double side band (DSB) receiver noise of the mixer was about 40 K over 4 - 6 GHz IF band, whereas we achieved the uncorrected single side band (SSB) noise temperature of about 70 K and better than 10 dB image rejection ratio in 2SB configuration with 8 - 10 GHz IF band. Insert-type receiver cartridges employing the mixers have been under commission for KVN stations.

A software simulator is developed for verifying the VLBI Correlation Subsystem (VCS) trial product hardware. This software simulator includes the delay tracking, fringe rotation, bit-jump, FFT analysis, re-quantization, and auto/cross-correlation functions so as to confirm the function of the VCS trial product hardware. To verify the effectiveness of the developed software simulator, we carried out experiments using the simulation data which is a mixed signal with white noise and tone signal generated by software. We confirmed that the performance of this software simulator is similar as that of the hardware system. In case of spectral analysis and re-quantization experiment, a serious problem of the VCS hardware, which is not enough for expressing the data stream of FFT results specified in VCS hardware specification, was found by this software simulator. Through the experiments, the performance of software simulator was verified to be efficient. In future, we will improve and modify the function of software simulator to be used as a software correlator of Korea-Japan Joint VLBI Correlator (KJJVC).