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

Author

Smolders, A.B. ; Arts, M.J. ; Jeuken, M.E.J. ; van Beurden, M.C.

Author_Institution

Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (NFRA), P.O. Box 2, 7990 AA Dwingeloo, The Netherlands, tel: +31 521 595100, fax: +31 521 597332, E-mail: smolders@nfra.nl

Volume

1

fYear

1998

fDate

Oct. 1998

Firstpage

161

Lastpage

166

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Broadband antennas; Electromagnetic modeling; Impedance matching; Optical design; Radio astronomy; Radio interferometry; Software performance; Software prototyping; System testing; Wideband;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Microwave Conference, 1998. 28th European

Conference_Location

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/EUMA.1998.338110

Filename

4139066