ASKAP Beamformer

Author

Bunton, John D. ; Hampson, Grant ; Brown, Andrew ; Pathikulangara, Joseph ; Tuthill, John ; Souza, L.D. ; Joseph, Jayasri ; Bateman, Tim ; Neuhold, Stephan

Author_Institution

CSIRO, Epping, NSW, Australia

fYear

2011

fDate

13-20 Aug. 2011

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

The SKA will be the mainstay of centimeter astronomy much of this century. It will have a sensitivity that is more than an order of magnitude greater than current radio telescopes. A second area for improved performance is the field of view (FoV). For frequencies above 1GHz a greater FoV may be achieved by placing a Phased Array Feed (PAF) at the focus of each of the SKA dishes. The design of the signal processing chain to convert the signal from a PAF to multiple independent beams on the sky is a major challenge. This paper describes the approach used by the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) to achieve this. The approach leads to a telescope that has a 30 square degree field of view at 1.45GHz.

Keywords

antenna phased arrays; radiotelescopes; sensitivity; signal processing; ASKAP beamformer; Australian SKA Pathfinder; PAF; SKA dishes; centimeter astronomy; field of view; frequency 1.45 GHz; multiple independent beams; phased array feed; radiotelescopes; sensitivity; signal processing chain design; Array signal processing; Arrays; Correlators; Delay; Feeds; Field programmable gate arrays; Filter banks;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

General Assembly and Scientific Symposium, 2011 XXXth URSI

Conference_Location

Istanbul

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5117-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/URSIGASS.2011.6123733

Filename

6123733