CHIME is great because it is so cheap. It's parabolic cylinders lying on the ground pointing fixedly straight up. The construction and mantainence cost per meter^2 of effective aperture is the lowest it possibly can be. It's basically a handful of large "half pipe" looking things next to shipping containers packed full of GPUs and power equipment. The only downside to this parabolic cylinder design is reflections down the long axis of the cylinder but that can be mitigated.
It's a (nearly) filled aperture with lots of redundant baselines which allows for easier calibration and seeing through the galactic foreground. But being so (relatively) closely spaced it's resolution is limited. Adding outriggers fixes this for when they want to get a position and I'd bet they put one at angles to the main array cylinder direction.
>"When I saw the data, I was basically paralyzed," says Christopher Bochenek (MS '18), lead author of a new Nature study on the STARE2 results, ... "At the radio frequencies we observe with STARE2, the signal was much stronger than what CHIME reported. We had caught the FRB head-on."
I'm surprised those are right next to it, but then, I can imagine they need to do a lot of filtering because the firehose of data is too much to send over the internet unfiltered.
Certainly not at the time. Although buying the GPUs that CHIME uses now would be a lot cheaper. What I meant is that where cost could be minimized it was. Relative to other radio telescopes of it's effective aperture it was/is spectacularly cheap.
It's a (nearly) filled aperture with lots of redundant baselines which allows for easier calibration and seeing through the galactic foreground. But being so (relatively) closely spaced it's resolution is limited. Adding outriggers fixes this for when they want to get a position and I'd bet they put one at angles to the main array cylinder direction.