Evaluating Receiver Noise Temperature of a Radio Telescope in the Presence of Mutual Coupling: Comparison of Current Methodologies

Abstract

© 2019 European Association on Antennas and Propagation. We present the computation of receiver noise temperature which includes the effects of mutual coupling of two different radio telescopes deployed in the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, namely the Murchison Widefield Array and the prototype Engineering Development Array. We used three different formulations that only require information of measured noise parameters of the low noise amplifier as used in the radio telescope and simulated S-parameter of the array to perform the calculation. In addition, we show convergence in computed receiver noise temperature for various pointing angles and array configurations (uniform and pseudo-random) that indicate agreement with existing literature.