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  • articleOpen Access

    Low-Cost, Low-Loss, Ultra-Wideband Compact Feed for Interferometric Radio Telescopes

    We have developed, manufactured, and tested a new feed design for interferometric radio telescopes with “large-N, small-D” designs. Such 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 frequency 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 (fD0.25). It is made of laser cut aluminum and printed circuit boards, such that it is inexpensive (75USD 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 fabricated for the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD) prototypes. When simulated on CHORD’s very deep dishes (fD=0.21) and with CHORD’s custom first-stage amplifiers, the on-sky system temperature Tsys of the complete receiving system from dish to digitizer remains below 30K over most of the 0.3–1.5GHz band, and maintains an aperture efficiency ηA 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.