Candidate Wire Spiral Antennas for the SKA Radio Telescope

Jiwani, Aziz and Padhi, Shantanu and Waterson, Mark and Hall, Peter J. and Bij de Vaate, Jan Geralt. 2012. Candidate Wire Spiral Antennas for the SKA Radio Telescope, in International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications (ICEAA), Sep 2-7 2012, pp. 510-513. Cape Town, South Africa: IEEE.

Source Title

2012 International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications (ICEAA)

Source Conference

International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications

DOI

10.1109/ICEAA.2012.6328680

ISBN

978-1-4673-0335-4

Remarks

© 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/4982

Collection

Curtin Research Publications

Abstract

The SKA is a next generation radio telescope employing phased aperture arrays at its lowest operating band (SKA-low) of 70 - 450 MHz. SKA-low is a dual-polarized array consisting of antenna elements with stable impedance and low cross-polarization. We select the well-known broadband conical spiral antenna and its dual-polarized derivative to be evaluated as candidate elements for SKA-low. Previously, we evaluated the sheet version of the conical spiral and found that it maintained well its broadband characteristics. Looking towards ease of manufacturing, we now evaluate wire versions of the designs. We find that the single-polarized wire version has stable impedance and low cross-polarization from 150 - 450 MHz. However, at low frequencies the cross polarization increases. The dual-polarized version maintains its characteristics over a small band but with higher (> -20 dB) cross polarizations. Measured results confirm the simulated antenna behavior.