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Expanding the field of view: station design for the AAMID SKA radio telescope

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Abstract

The new generation radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) currently under construction, will use aperture array, technology for the low frequency regime. For SKA2, the second phase scheduled after the realization of SKA1, aperture array technology is proposed up to 1.4 GHz. The antenna element count, as well as the signal processing cost, of such a system will be high. In this paper we analyze an option to reduce the number of antenna elements by making the array sparse. To reduce the signal processing cost Fast Fourier Transform Beamforming is proposed and it performance is compared to traditional beamforming. To guide the system design a Figure of Merit for the performance cost ratio is proposed and evaluated for various levels of sparsity of the antenna array. It is concluded that, for equal front-end and back-end costs, a sparse system is only marginally better than a dense system. Only when signal processing cost is significantly lower than the front-end hardware, a sparse system can be competitive.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), Dwingeloo, the Netherlands

    Jan Geralt Bij de Vaate & Wim A. van Cappellen

  2. Dept. Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Jan Geralt Bij de Vaate, Dirk I. L. de Villiers & David B. Davidson

  3. ICRAR-Curtin University, Perth, Australia

    David B. Davidson

Authors
  1. Jan Geralt Bij de Vaate
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  2. Dirk I. L. de Villiers
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  3. David B. Davidson
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  4. Wim A. van Cappellen
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Correspondence to Jan Geralt Bij de Vaate.

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Bij de Vaate, J.G., de Villiers, D.I.L., Davidson, D.B. et al. Expanding the field of view: station design for the AAMID SKA radio telescope. Exp Astron 51, 1–16 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-020-09682-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-020-09682-9

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