[citation needed] In 2017 the telescope received the planned upgrade, doubling both the number of antennas, resulting in an increase in resolution and sensitivity.

[citation needed] The MWA is an inherently versatile instrument with a very large field of view, on the order of 30 degrees across, able to cover a wide range of scientific goals.

In Phase I the array provided a wealth of scientific papers covering topics such as detection of H II region(s) in the Galactic plane, limits on radio emission from extra-solar planets, observations of haloes and relics in galaxy clusters to detection of transient radio sources and space debris tracking.

Two of the most significant results from the Phase I MWA were: In January 2022, a team led by Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker of Curtin University re-analyzed 2018 GLEAM data and announced in Nature that object GLEAM-X J162759.5−523504.3 is a long periodicity (1,091.170 second / 18m11s) object, that provided a bright pulse of energy for up to a minute, and is some 4,000 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way galaxy.

[13] An MWA antenna consists of a four by four regular grid of dual-polarization dipole elements arranged on a 4m x 4m steel mesh ground plane.

Signals from each dipole pass through a low noise amplifier (LNA) and are combined in an analogue beamformer to produce tile beams on the sky.

Sets of 1.28 MHz coarse frequency channels are transmitted via an optical fiber connection to the correlator subsystem, located in the CSIRO Data Processing Facility near the MWA site.

[citation needed] In Phase I the majority of the tiles (112) were scattered across a roughly 1.5 km core region, forming an array with very high imaging quality, and a field of view of several hundred square degrees at a resolution of several arcminutes.

The new hexagonal super tiles in the compact configuration make use of the concept of "redundant spacings" to help calibrate the array to high precision for detection of the EoR.

As of December 2018 the resultant initially calibrated data are then provided to the international astronomical community via the MWA node of the Australian All-Sky Virtual Observatory (ASVO).

Significant processed data products produced by the MWA Collaboration such as the initial release of the GLEAM survey are also available via various international scientific databases for subsequent analysis and interpretation.

[citation needed] During Phase I, the MWA consortium initially comprised 110 individual researchers drawn from 12 institutions from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and India.

New Zealand joined the consortium in late 2011 and an additional two institutions from the United States were added in 2014 taking the total number of Phase I partner organizations to 14.