PL612 LOFAR station in Bałdy

The PL-612 station is located in the village of Bałdy, approximately 20 km from the UWM campus in Olsztyn.

On an area of around 2 hectares (a field measuring 100 x 200 meters), the station hosts 96 HBA antennas (boxes covered with black foil) and 96 LBA antennas (simple lattices with two-meter vertical posts). The radio signals received by the HBA and LBA antennas are processed by a complex system of sampling and quantizing components, and then transmitted—at speeds ranging from 10 to 100 Gb/s—to a supercomputer that correlates the signals from all LOFAR stations across Europe.

The PL-612 station is equipped with the following radio components:

• High-Band Antennas (HBA) designed to receive waves in the 110–250 MHz range (wavelengths from 3 to 1 meters),
• Low-Band Antennas (LBA) designed for the 10–90 MHz range (wavelengths from 10 to 4 meters).

A key element where the cables from all the sensors converge is the container. Inside the container is a specially shielded room known as a Faraday cage, designed to prevent interference generated by electronic and computing devices from affecting the signals received by the system’s antennas.

The container houses:

• Power supply systems for all internal components,
• LCU (Local Control Unit) – the central system management computer,
• Front-end units for both the LBA and HBA systems,
• RCU (Remote Control Units) – devices responsible for antenna operation and signal processing,
• TBB (Transient Buffer Boards) – data buffers for analyzing short-term radio phenomena,
• Time control systems.