The Design and Performance of a Wideband Radio Telescope for the GAVRT Program

Author

Imbriale, William A. ; Weinreb, Sander ; Jones, Glenn ; Mani, Hamdi ; Akgiray, Ahmed

Author_Institution

Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena, CA, USA

Volume

59

Issue

6

fYear

2011

fDate

6/1/2011 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1954

Lastpage

1962

Abstract

A wideband Radio Telescope was designed and built for use in the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) program. It uses an existing 34-m antenna retrofitted with a tertiary offset mirror placed at the vertex of the main reflector. It can be rotated to allow using two feeds that cover the 0.5-14-GHz band. The feed for 4.0-14.0 GHz is a cryogenically cooled, commercially available, open-boundary quadridge horn from ETS-Lindgren. Coverage from 0.5 to 4.0 GHz is provided by an uncooled lower frequency version of the same feed that uses a cooled LNA. The measured aperture efficiency is greater than 40% over much of the band.

Keywords

antennas; radiotelescopes; ETS-Lindgren; GAVRT program; Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope; antenna; cooled LNA; frequency 0.5 GHz to 14 GHz; frequency 4.0 GHz to 14.0 GHz; open-boundary quadridge horn; size 34 m; tertiary offset mirror; wideband radio telescope; Antenna feeds; Cryogenics; Mirrors; Noise; Wideband; Noise temperature; quadridge horn; radio telescope; reflector antennas; wideband feeds;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-926X

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TAP.2011.2123863

Filename

5729791