Holographic measurement of KAT-7 primary beams

The Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) is an L-band radio interferometric telescope that is built as a precursor to the MeerKAT by SKA SA. Full polarisation primary beam patterns of such instruments have attracted interest recently for use in modern imaging algorithms. This paper describes an advance in the holographic technique that is used to measure the primary beam patterns of the KAT-7 antennas at L-band. The proposed calibration method does not need time-consuming ontarget pointings which are conventionally required, and achieves this by modelling the high gain region of the beam. Frequency dependent beam squint characteristics are encountered, which provides additional motivation for the use of the technique.