A flexible hybrid spectrometer for balloon borne and ground based (sub)millimeter wavelength astronomy

This paper describes a flexible spectrometer architecture consisting of standard units that can be configured to meet different requirements. The spectrometer is a hybrid between an analog filterbank and digital autocorrelator. Two applications are given, one for balloon borne submillimeter radio astronomy employing a compact and low power design, and one for millimeter imaging with a much more powerful and flexible system. The basic hardware and software units are described as well as the overall architecture. Thanks to the modularized approach the spectrometer can easily be modified for other application areas, such as plasma physics or molecular spectroscopy.