We have trialled for the first time live measurements of individual pulses from Vela. The figure shows about 10 seconds of data, for the telescope in “tied-array beam mode”, adding the signal from a quarter of the telescope’s modules (88) coherently.

Individual pulses are seen at phase ~0.9 in the figure, with a range of S/N, as expected. The mean S/N is about 7. About 110 individual pulses were seen. It was gratifying to see such clean pulses, despite a lot of phone call activity going on at the time (several mobile handsets operate in our frequency band) which show the power of having an array!Seeing individual pulses live is an important step on the way to searching for FRBs.

Credit: Vikram Ravi, Manisha Caleb, Chris Flynn.