Current status : The mechanical construction of the radio telescope in complete and the control software will be delivered in final form this April. Building work for the optical observatory is due to take place in the summer.
Receiver : The 22GHz front-end is a copy of a MERLIN K-band receiver which is now nearly complete and due to be installed in the summer. It operates in both circular polarisations and the polariser and the first amplifiers are cooled to about 10 K by a closed-cycle helium refrigeration system. This apparatus was funded by a JREI grant to M. D. Gray. 
The front-end converts the signals to an intermediate frequency (IF)  near 4.2 GHz. These will be further converted to a second IF at 150 MHz in a mixer stage on the telescope using a local oscillator whose frequency can be adjusted by the supervising computer to allow for the Doppler effect of the Earth’s velocity. This part of the receiver is being developed and built in-house. 
The back-end is a fourier spectrometer specially developed under a JREI grant to M. R. W. Masheder in partnership with AlphaData Parallel Systems Ltd. (Edinburgh) and Beam Ltd. (Bristol). Fourier transforms are taken in real time by FFT code written for field programmable gate arrays (fpga). The data are therefore integrated in the frequency domain. This very flexible arrangement will be used to provide a pair of power spectra with 4096 channels over 25 MHz. Further details of this apparatus is given elsewhere.