Design of a Wide-Band Phased-Array Antenna for the Next Generation Radio Telescopes

The next generation of radio telescopes will have two orders of magnitude more sensitivity than presentday radio telescopes. At this moment, a lot of effort is put in defining this new radio telescope: SKAI, the Square Kilometre Array Interferometer. For that purpose, four demonstrator phased-array systems are being developed at NFRA. The One Square Metre Array (OSMA) is the second demonstrator system and is currently being tested. For OSMA, a wide-band printed antenna element with an integrated balun was developed and tested experimentally. Electromagnetic models and corresponding software were used to predict and optimise the scan performance of the wide-band element in an array environment. Theoretical and experimental results of several prototype arrays will be presented in this paper.