Prototyping and Field Testing Active Antennas for the Long Wavelength Array

Details Prototyping and Field Testing Active Antennas for the Long Wavelength Array Prototyping and Field Testing Active Antennas for the Long Wavelength Array

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.1106w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #11.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.744

Computer Science

Performance

Scientific paper

The Long Wavelength Array (LWA, http://lwa.unm.edu), currently in the development stage, is a large, radio telescope array that will be built in New Mexico, USA, and will explore the Universe in the 20 - 80 MHz frequency band. The LWA will consist of 52 stations of 256 active antennas each. The active antennas are to be electrically short dipole-based receptors with low noise preamplifiers installed at the feed points. The receptors must be designed to operate over a broader bandwidth than traditional thin wire half wavelength resonant dipoles, and must exhibit wide half-power beam widths to maximize sky coverage. The active antennas must also exhibit Galactic noise dominated (by 6-10 dB) performance in the LWA frequency band. The large number of active antennas needed for this instrument ( 13,000 in the full array) necessitates that the design must be kept simple and inexpensive in order to facilitate mass production and minimize the overall station cost.
We present the leading receptor designs for the Long Wavelength Array and discuss recent advances in the development of the low noise preamplifier, which has been designed in concert with the receptors. We also report on a recent prototyping and field testing campaign undertaken by members of the LWA project, during which side-by-side comparisons of the active antenna designs under consideration were performed. The measured sky noise dominance characteristics of each active antenna candidate are presented. We discuss these results and the work that must be done in the near future to finalize the active antenna design for the first LWA station.
Basic research in radio astronomy at the Naval Research Laboratory is supported by 6.1 base funding.

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