TSA element design for 500-1500 MHz array

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project is exploring issues pertinent to deployment of a radio telescope comprised of wide-band phased arrays with a total receiving area of 10/sup 6/ m/sup 2/. Present scenarios consider a large collecting area comprised of several large subarrays with thousands of elements each. The subarrays will be placed within an area extending a few hundred kilometers and interferometric beamforming techniques will be employed for scanning of multiple beams in the manner of a VLB array. The field of view of the subarrays will be at least 100/spl deg/. Although SKA will be dual-polarized to permit extraction of polarization information from the received signals, the THousand Element Array (THEA) demonstration project will be restricted to a single polarization. This paper describes the design and predicted performance of a tapered slot antenna array to fulfil the THEA requirements. Several relevant array specifications are listed.