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Published January 11, 2015 | Published + Supplemental Material + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Astronomical receiver modelling using scattering matrices

Abstract

Proper modelling of astronomical receivers is vital: it describes the systematic errors in the raw data, guides the receiver design process, and assists data calibration. In this paper, we describe a method of analytically modelling the full signal and noise behaviour of arbitrarily complex radio receivers. We use electrical scattering matrices to describe the signal behaviour of individual components in the receiver, and noise correlation matrices to describe their noise behaviour. These are combined to produce the full receiver model. We apply this approach to a specified receiver architecture: a hybrid of a continuous comparison radiometer and correlation polarimeter designed for the C-Band All-Sky Survey. We produce analytic descriptions of the receiver Mueller matrix and noise temperature, and discuss how imperfections in crucial components affect the raw data. Many of the conclusions drawn are generally applicable to correlation polarimeters and continuous comparison radiometers.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 October 16. Received 2014 October 16; in original form 2014 September 5. First published online November 19, 2014. The C-BASS project is a collaboration between Caltech/JPL in the US, Oxford and Manchester Universities in the UK, and Rhodes University and the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory in South Africa. It is funded by the NSF (AST-0607857, AST-1010024, and AST-1212217), the University of Oxford, the Royal Society, and the other participating institutions. We thank Russ Keeney for technical support of the C-BASS project at OVRO. We thank the Xilinx University Programme for their donation of FPGAs to this project. OGK acknowledges the support of a Dorothy Hodgkin Award in funding his studies while a student at Oxford, and the support of a W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech. ACT acknowledges support from a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship. CC acknowledges the support of the Commonwealth Scholarship, Square Kilometer Array South Africa and Hertford College.

Attached Files

Published - 1252.full.pdf

Submitted - 1410.5469v1.pdf

Supplemental Material - supplemental_material.zip

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