Array Configurations That Tile the Plane

Future radiotelescopes need to have high sensitivity. With the limits of receiver sensitivity being reached this can only be achieved by increasing collecting area. Because of this, next generation telescopes will have hundreds if not thousands of large antennas. The large number of antennas greatly increases the possible array configurations or ways of locating the antennas. In this paper a variety of antenna configurations are considered which divides the antennas into two classes 1. A single area of antennas where the antennas are placed on a widely spaced grid. 2. A set of compact components where, within each component, the antennas are closely packed. With these it is possible to obtain configurations that densely and uniformly sample the UV plane. This allows high quality imaging. The configurations also allow considerable savings in correlator complexity and demonstrate the possibility of asymmetric configurations