New Generation VLBI: Intraday UT1 Estimations

Alexander Ipatov, Dmitriy Ivanov, Gennadiy Ilin, Sergei Smolentsev, Iskander Gayazov, Vyacheslav Mardyshkin, Leonid Fedotov, Victor Stempkovski, Alexander Vytnov, Alexander Salnikov, Igor Surkis, Andrey Mikhailov, Dmitriy Marshalov, Ilya Bezrukov, Alexey Melnikov, Voytsekh Ken, Sergei Kurdubov

IVS 2016 General Meeting Proceedings "New Horizons with VGOS", Edited by Dirk Behrend, Karen D. Baver, and Kyla L. Armstrong NASA/CP-2016-219016, 106–110 (2016)

Keywords: VLBI, VGOS, UT1

Abstract

IAA finished work on the creation of the new generation radio interferometer with two VGOS antennas co-located at Badary and Zelenchukskaya. 48 single baseline one-hour VLBI sessions (up to four sessions per day) were performed from 04 Nov to 18 Nov 2015. Observations were carried out using wideband S/X receivers, three X-band and one S-band 512 MHz channels at one or two circular polarizations. Sessions consisted of about 60 scans with a 22-second minimum scan duration. The stations’ broadband acquisition systems generated 1.5–3 TB data per session, which were transferred via Internet to the IAA FX correlator. The accuracy of the group delay in a single channel was 10-20 ps, which allows the use of every single channel’s observations for geodetic analysis without synthesis. 156 single channel NGS-cards were obtained in total. The RMS of the differences between UT1–UTC estimates and IERS finals values is 19 µs.