On November 2003, the Dutch Government issued a grant of 52 million Euros to the LOFAR project, following years of planning and lobbying. LOFAR, the Low Frequency Array, is meant to be a large radio telescope that will open up the virgin territory of observations at low radio frequencies for a broad range of astrophysical studies. Its high sensitivity and resolution will dramatically improve results obtained from previous facilities operating at these wavelengths. The astronomical science case has four major themes: (i) the epoch of reionisation; (ii) the origin of cosmic rays; (iii) transient sources and high energy objects; (iv) formation and evolution of galaxies and quasars. The telescope itself will consists of a hundred stations, each consisting of a few hundred dipoles, in the Netherlands and Northern Germany. First operations with a central core of stations are planned for 2005. The ASTRON foundation is leading the overall management and technical work on the project, while Röttgering and Miley are involved in the detailed scientific definition of the instrument.
During 2003, overall system design efforts intensified and work packages were defined including low-band antenna, receiver and clock unit, central processing, calibration and wide area networking. The small town of Exloo in the municipality of Borger-Odoorn was chosen as the center of the LOFAR array. A detailed 'ruimtelijke ordening plan' (environmental plan) was developed and presented to the community, followed by detailed negotiations related to land-use which are still continuing. The first LOFAR test station became operational during mid 2003. It consisted of ten prototype antenna's, a digitizing system and a simple software reduction system. It succesfully detected the Sun and mapped the Galactic plane.