A combined electromagnetic and microwave antenna system simulator for radio astronomy

A generic numerical tool has been developed to compute/optimize the sensitivity of array antenna receiver systems. This antenna system simulator is comprised of an ElectroMagnetic (EM) simulator and a MicroWave simulator (MW) for modeling the signal and noise characteristics of each receiver component. This analysis includes accurate modeling of the background noise (sky+ground), which is essential in radio astronomical applications, as well as the losses, reflections and noise contributions that occur in the microwave beamforming network. Validation has been carried out for a 4x1 monopole array receiver system. The modeled absolute power levels for a noisy ´hot´ and ´cold´ environment are in very good agreement with the measured noise power levels.