A Novel UAV Beam Measurement System for the SKA1-LOW Telescope
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Farhat, Iman; Magro, Alessio; Bezzina, Mark; Adami, Kristian Zarb; de Lera Acedo, Eloy; Massa, Livia; Josaitis, Alec; Gueuning, Quentin; Pettett, Alexander; Brown, Anthony; Craeye, Christophe
- Source
- 2021 15th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP) Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), 2021 15th European Conference on. :1-5 Mar, 2021
- Subject
- Aerospace
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Photonics and Electrooptics
Signal Processing and Analysis
Antenna measurements
Shape
Simulation
Adaptive arrays
Telescopes
Prediction algorithms
Aperture antennas
antennas
electromagnetics
propagation
measurements
- Language
This paper presents a verification system to characterize the far-field beam pattern for SKALA4 antenna using a customized drone referred to as FOX. The measurements campaign was conducted to verify one of the important FOX customized features which is the long flight time duration (20 minutes) and investigate FOX capability as a flying far-field source. Apart from describing the FOX drone used in the field trials, the paper discusses the de-embedding algorithm that is used to extract the radiation pattern from the sampled data. The measured radiation pattern of SKALA4 antenna operating at 50 MHz is found to be in good agreement with the full-wave predictions. The results show that this technique is very promising for ongoing and future radio experiments.