14 research outputs found
Performance of polarimetric beamformers for phased array radio telescopes
The results of four recently introduced beamforming schemes for phased array systems are discussed, each of which is capable to provide high sensitivity and accurate polarimetric performance of array-based radio telescopes. Ideally, a radio polarimeter should recover the actual polarization state of the celestial source, and thus compensate for unwanted polarization degradation effects which are intrinsic to the instrument. In this paper, we compare the proposed beamforming schemes through an example of a practical phased array system (APERTIF prototype) and demonstrate that the optimal beamformer, the max-SLNR beamformer, the eigenvector beamformer, and the bi-scalar beamformer are sensitivity equivalent but lead to different polarization state solutions, some of which are sub-optimal
Performance of Polarimetric Beamformers for Phased Array Radio Telescopes
Abstract The results of four recently introduced beamforming schemes for phased array systems are discussed, each of which is capable to provide high sensitivity and accurate polarimetric performance of array-based radio telescopes. Ideally, a radio polarimeter should recover the actual polarization state of the celestial source, and thus compensate for unwanted polarization degradation effects which are intrinsic to the instrument. In this paper, we compare the proposed beamforming schemes through an example of a practical phased array system (APERTIF prototype) and demonstrate that the optimal beamformer, the max-SLNR beamformer, the eigenvector beamformer, and the bi-scalar beamformer are sensitivity equivalent but lead to different polarization state solutions, some of which are sub-optimal
Preliminary Characterization of the Digitally Formed Beams of PHAROS2 Phased Array Feed
We describe the beamforming strategy and the preliminary laboratory characterization results of the beam pattern synthesized by the PHAROS2 Phased Array Feed (PAF), a 4-8 GHz PAF with digital beamformer for radio astronomy application. The PAF is based on an array of 10×11 dual-polarization Vivaldi antennas cryogenically cooled at 20 K along with low noise amplification modules (LNAs) cascaded with a multi-channel Warm Section (WS) receiver. We present the beamforming and test procedures used to, respectively digitally synthesize and characterize the PHAROS2 antenna array beam pattern at 6 GHz. The tests of the array were carried out at room temperature by directly connecting 24 antenna elements to the WS and iTPM digital beamformer in a laboratory measurement setup
Redundancy Calibration of Phased Array Stations
Our aim is to assess the benefits and limitations of using the redundant
visibility information in regular phased array systems for improving the
calibration.
Regular arrays offer the possibility to use redundant visibility information
to constrain the calibration of the array independent of a sky model and a beam
models of the station elements. It requires a regular arrangement in the
configuration of array elements and identical beam patterns.
We revised a calibration method for phased array stations using the redundant
visibility information in the system and applied it successfully to a LOFAR
station. The performance and limitations of the method were demonstrated by
comparing its use on real and simulated data. The main limitation is the mutual
coupling between the station elements, which leads to non-identical beams and
stronger baseline dependent noise. Comparing the variance of the estimated
complex gains with the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) indicates that redundancy is a
stable and optimum method for calibrating the complex gains of the system.
Our study shows that the use of the redundant visibility does improve the
quality of the calibration in phased array systems. In addition it provides a
powerful tool for system diagnostics. Our results demonstrate that designing
redundancy in both the station layout and the array configuration of future
aperture arrays is strongly recommended. In particular in the case of the
Square Kilometre Array with its dynamic range requirement which surpasses any
existing array by an order of magnitude.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in the A&A in Section
13, acceptance date: 1st May 2012. NOTE: Please contact the first author for
high resolution figure
Calibration Challenges for Future Radio Telescopes
Instruments for radio astronomical observations have come a long way. While
the first telescopes were based on very large dishes and 2-antenna
interferometers, current instruments consist of dozens of steerable dishes,
whereas future instruments will be even larger distributed sensor arrays with a
hierarchy of phased array elements. For such arrays to provide meaningful
output (images), accurate calibration is of critical importance. Calibration
must solve for the unknown antenna gains and phases, as well as the unknown
atmospheric and ionospheric disturbances. Future telescopes will have a large
number of elements and a large field of view. In this case the parameters are
strongly direction dependent, resulting in a large number of unknown parameters
even if appropriately constrained physical or phenomenological descriptions are
used. This makes calibration a daunting parameter estimation task, that is
reviewed from a signal processing perspective in this article.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 20 subfigures The title quoted in the meta-data
is the title after release / final editing
Polarimetry With Phased Array Antennas: Theoretical Framework and Definitions
For phased array receivers, the accuracy with which the polarization state of a received signal can be measured depends on the antenna configuration, array calibration process, and beamforming algorithms. A signal and noise model for a dual-polarized array is developed and related to standard polarimetric antenna figures of merit, and the ideal polarimetrically calibrated, maximum-sensitivity beamforming solution for a dual-polarized phased array feed is derived. A practical polarimetric beamformer solution that does not require exact knowledge of the array polarimetric response is shown to be equivalent to the optimal solution in the sense that when the practical beamformers are calibrated, the optimal solution is obtained. To provide a rough initial polarimetric calibration for the practical beamformer solution, an approximate single-source polarimetric calibration method is developed. The modeled instrumental polarization error for a dipole phased array feed with the practical beamformer solution and single-source polarimetric calibration was -10 dB or lower over the array field of view for elements with alignments perturbed by random rotations with 5 degree standard deviation
Digital Architectures for UWB Beamforming Using 2D IIR Spatio-Temporal Frequency-Planar Filters
A design method and an FPGA-based prototype implementation of massively parallel systolic-array VLSI architectures
for 2nd-order and 3rd-order frequency-planar beam plane-wave filters are proposed. Frequency-planar beamforming enables highly-directional UWB RF beams at low computational complexity compared to digital phased-array feed techniques. The array factors of the proposed realizations are simulated
and both high-directional selectivity and UWB performance are demonstrated. The proposed architectures operate using 2's complement finite precision digital arithmetic. The real-time throughput is maximized using look-ahead optimization applied locally to each processor in the proposed massively-parallel realization of the filter. From sensitivity theory, it is shown that 15 and 19-bit precision for filter coefficients results in better than 3% error for 2nd- and 3rd-order beam filters. Folding together with Ktimes multiplexing is applied to the proposed beam architectures such that throughput can be traded for K-fold lower complexity for realizing the 2-D fan filter banks. Prototype FPGA circuit implementations of these filters are proposed using a Virtex 6 xc6vsx475t-2ff1759 device. The FPGA-prototyped architectures are evaluated using area (A), critical path delay (T), and metrics AT and AT2. The L2 error energy is used as a metric for evaluating fixed-point noise levels and the accuracy of the finite precision digital arithmetic circuits