PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | September 17, 2012
Proc. SPIE. 8444, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes IV
KEYWORDS: Signal to noise ratio, Reflectors, Holography, Calibration, Satellites, Receivers, Field programmable gate arrays, Radio telescopes, Antennas, Microwave radiation
Microwave holography is a well-established technique for mapping surface errors of large reflector antennas, particularly those designed to operate at high frequencies.
We present here a holography system based on the interferometric method for mapping the primary reflector surface of the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT). SRT is a new 64-m-diameter antenna located in Sardinia, Italy, equipped with an
active surface and designed to operate up to 115 GHz.
The system consists mainly of two radio frequency low-noise coherent channels, designed to receive Ku-band digital TV signals from geostationary satellites. Two commercial prime focus low-noise block converters are installed on the radio telescope under test and on a small reference antenna, respectively. Then the signals are amplified, filtered and downconverted to baseband. An innovative digital back-end based on FPGA technology has been implemented to digitize two 5 MHz-band signals and calculate their cross-correlation in real-time. This is carried out by using a 16-bit resolution ADCs and a FPGA reaching very large amplitude dynamic range and reducing post-processing time. The final
holography data analysis is performed by CLIC data reduction software developed within the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM, Grenoble, France).
The system was successfully tested during several holography measurement campaigns, recently performed at the
Medicina 32-m radio telescope. Two 65-by-65 maps, using an on-the-fly raster scan with on-source phase calibration,
were performed pointing the radio telescope at 38 degrees elevation towards EUTELSAT 7A satellite. The high SNR
(greater than 60 dB) and the good phase stability led to get an accuracy on the surface error maps better than 150 μm
RMS.
