Experiments with calibrated digital sideband separating downconversion

Abstract

This article reports on the first step in a focused program to re-optimize radio astronomy receiver architecture to better take advantage of the latest advancements in commercial digital technology. Specifically, an L-Band sideband-separating downconverter has been built using a combination of careful (but ultimately very simple) analog design and digital signal processing to achieve wideband downconversion of an RFI-rich frequency spectrum to baseband in a single mixing step, with a fixed-frequency Local Oscillator and stable sideband isolation exceeding 50 dB over a 12 degree C temperature range.

10 pages, 12 figures, to be published in PASP

Cited by in corpus (5)

• A Calibrated Digital Sideband Separating Spectrometer for Radio Astronomy Applications
• Compact Orthomode Transducers Using Digital Polarization Synthesis
• Ultra-pure digital sideband separation at sub-millimeter wavelengths
• Unformatted Digital Fiber-Optic Data Transmission for Radio Astronomy Front-Ends
• Digital compensation of the side-band-rejection ratio in a fully analog 2SB sub-millimeter receiver