Wideband planar phased arrays for the square kilometre array

The Square Kilometre Array development demands a radio telescope with a high sensitivity, dual polarization and wide field of view over a broad bandwidth to meet the scientific goals. For the mid-frequencies of the SKA (nominally 400MHz to 1.4GHz) observation is preferred using wideband phased array to reduce the survey time over the sky. To meet sensitivity and sidelobe requirements the total number of elements will be of the order of 10⁸ so cost is a prime consideration. Two demonstrators composed of different array elements aiming at low cost, low noise temperature are presented. The preliminary results for these arrays are reported.