Dual-beam Wide-band Beamformer with Integrated Antenna Array

As part of the development of a new international radio-telescope SKA (Square Kilometre Array), three phased-array prototypes with increasing complexity have been developed. The final SKA telescope will consist of more than one million receiving antenna elements and will operate in the frequency range of 200 to 2000 MHz. One of the challenges of the next generation radio telescopes for astronomy is its capacity to cope with the increasing problem of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). The application of phased-array beamforming techniques opens the possibility to spatially null RFI in the digital domain prior to correlation. This paper presents results from the third phased-array experimental demonstrator that is being developed at NFRA, the THousand Element Array (THEA), on the RF Beamformer boards with integrated antenna array.