Low-cost, Low-loss, Ultra-wideband Compact Feed for Interferometric Radio Telescopes

Abstract

We have developed, built, and tested a new feed design for interferometric radio telescopes with "large-$N$, small-$D$" designs. Those arrays require low-cost and low-complexity feeds for mass production on reasonable timescales and budgets, and also require those feeds to be compact to minimize obstruction of the dishes, along with having ultra wide bands of operation for most current and future science goals. The feed presented in this paper modifies the exponentially tapered slot antenna (Vivaldi) and quad-ridged flared horn antenna designs by having an oversized backshort, a novel method of maintaining a small size that is well-suited for deeper dishes ($f/D\le 0.25$). It is made of laser cut aluminum and printed circuit boards, such that it is inexpensive ($\lesssim$ 75 USD per feed in large-scale production) and quick to build; it has a 5:1 frequency ratio, and its size is approximately a third of its longest operating wavelength. We present the science and engineering constraints that went into design decisions, the development and optimization process, and the simulated performance. A version of this feed design was optimized and built for the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD) prototypes. When simulated on CHORD's very deep dishes ($f/D=0.21$) and with CHORD's custom first stage amplifiers, the on-sky system temperature $T_{\mathrm{sys}}$ of the complete receiving system from dish to digitizer remains below 30 K over most of the 0.3-1.5 GHz band, and maintains an aperture efficiency ${\eta }_{\mathrm{A}}$ between 0.4 and 0.6. The entire receiving chain operates at ambient temperature. The feed is designed to slightly under-illuminate the CHORD dishes, in order to minimize coupling between array elements and spillover.

arXiv comment19 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Cosmology at Low Frequencies: The 21 cm Transition and the High-Redshift Universe
• The Temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• 21-cm cosmology
• Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA)
• Science with the Square Kilometer Array: Motivation, Key Science Projects, Standards and Assumptions
• Data Analysis for Precision 21 cm Cosmology
• Blind foreground subtraction for intensity mapping experiments
• The Allen Telescope Array: The First Widefield, Panchromatic, Snapshot Radio Camera for Radio Astronomy and SETI
• Power Spectrum Sensitivity and the Design of Epoch of Reionization Observatories
• Mitigating Internal Instrument Coupling II: A Method Demonstration with the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array
• Mitigating Internal Instrument Coupling for 21 cm Cosmology I: Temporal and Spectral Modeling in Simulations
• A fundamental figure of merit for radio polarimeters
• Array Element Coupling in Radio Interferometry I: A Semi-Analytic Approach
• Design of the New Wideband Vivaldi Feed for the HERA Radio-Telescope Phase II
• The cloverleaf antenna: A compact wide-bandwidth dual-polarization feed for CHIME
• MID-Radio Telescope, Single Pixel Feed Packages for the Square Kilometre Array: An Overview
• 0.3-to-1.5-GHz LNA with Wideband Noise and Power Matching for Radio Astronomy

Cited by in corpus (1)

• 0.3-to-1.5-GHz LNA with Wideband Noise and Power Matching for Radio Astronomy