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.

An area of approximately 2 hectares, a field measuring 100 m × 200 m, accommodates 96 HBA antennas (boxes covered with black sheeting) and 96 LBA antennas (simple lattice structures with two-metre posts). Radio signals recorded by the HBA and LBA antennas are analysed by a complex system of signal sampling and quantization components and then transmitted, at a rate of 10–100 Gbit/s, to a supercomputer that correlates signals from all European LOFAR stations.

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 (from 3 to 1 metre).
• Low-Band Antennas (LBA), designed to receive waves in the 10–90 MHz range (from 10 to 4 metres).

A very important component is the container, where cables carrying signals from the individual sensors that make up the station converge. The container houses a specially shielded interior, known as a Faraday cage, to prevent interference generated by electronic equipment and computers 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 computer for system management
• front-end units for the LBA and HBA systems
• RCU (Remote Control Units) – remote control units managing antenna operation and signal processing.
• TBB (Transient Buffer Boards) – data buffers for analysing short-lived radio phenomena
• timing control systems

In 2023–2026, the first mandatory modernization of all European LOFAR stations (LOFAR 2.0), including the three Polish stations, was carried out within LOFAR ERIC. In Poland, the modernization was undertaken through the project ‘Participation of the POLFAR consortium and the POLFARO working group in the European ILT structure for 2021–2026’, funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (agreement No. 2021/WK/02).

The LOFAR PL-612 station in Bałdy was the first Polish LOFAR 2.0 station to become operational (June 2026).