Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Veidt, B
• Hovey, G J
• Burgess, T
• Smegal, R J
• Messing, R
• Willis, A G
• Gray, A D
• Dewdney, P E

Titel

Demonstration of a Dual-Polarized Phased-Array Feed

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation, 2011-06, Vol.59 (6), p.2047-2057

Ort / Verlag

New York: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• We describe the design and construction of a dual-polarized phased-array feed (PAF) with the purpose of demonstrating this technology as a means of expanding the instantaneous field-of-view of radio telescopes. The PAF beamformer is calibrated with observations of an unpolarized astronomical radio source, the covariance matrix of all receiver channels is calculated, and the two dominant eigenvectors are then used as beamformer weights. We show measurements demonstrating the capabilities of this instrument as a polarimeter, and confirm that the calibration method does produce orthogonally-polarized beams. These results are then analyzed to show the sensitivity to fluctuations in gain and phase in the multiple parallel receiver chains making up the phased-array feed. We also compare the performance of PAFs that beamform all array elements with PAFs that beamform only co-polarized elements.