| 15th of April 2016 |
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| Improving Measurements of PAFs at CSIRO |
| by Aaron Chippendale (CASS) |
| This week, CSIRO's development of new techniques to measure signal and noise in
phased array feeds (PAFs) is being presented at the 10th European Conference
on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP2016)
in Davos, Switzerland. A PAF is a dense array of antenna elements at the focus of a radio telescope dish that, with digital processing, can produce multiple
simultaneous antenna beams of high sensitivity throughout a wide field of view.
The paper introduces new techniques including aperture array noise measurements with beamforming weights matched to a parabolic reflector's focal field. Weights are calculated via antenna-range and on-dish measurements. We also describe the separation of system temperature and aperture efficiency via drift scans. Read the full paper at arxiv:1602.00402. |