Effective aperture of a large pseudorandom low-frequency dipole array

The long wavelength array (LWA) is a new aperture synthesis radio telescope, now in the design phase, that will operate at frequencies from about 20 MHz to about 80 MHz.This paper describes some preliminary estimates of Ae for such an array. This is a non-trivial problem because the antennas are strongly coupled and interact strongly with the ground. To bound the scope of this preliminary investigation, the antennas are modeled as thin straight half-wave (nearly resonant) dipoles, and we restrict our attention to the co-polarized fields in the principal planes. First, we consider results for a single element in isolation. Next, we consider the results for the entire array, which are compared to the results for the single element and also to the physical aperture of the station.