Title: Receiver technology for radio astronomy and deep space communications
Abstract: This thesis presents the design and development of a complete receiver system for a conversion project, which replaces the commercial receiver of a telecommunication antenna with a cryogenically cooled radio astronomy receiver. Part of the project is to explore the synergy between radio astronomy and deep-space communications, which share many technical requirements, but also have technical conflicts. Therefore, this thesis attempts to solve some of these technological issues and provides a design for a receiver system, where radio astronomy and communication applications can successfully share the same hardware and infrastructure. The receiver system employs a FPGA-based digital signal processing backend, which enables the instrument to be used in three different operational modes, single-dish observation, interferometer observation, and deep-space communication. The architecture of the receiver system includes a novel technical solution to stabilise gain drift when used in single-dish observation mode. Two stabilisation methods are discussed in detail, and their performance is verified by measurements. The white-noise stabilisation approach uses a modulated reference noise signal and the continuous-wave stabilisation approach uses a narrowband reference signal to track the change in am- plification. Both stabilisation methods showed excellent performance and are implemented to stabilise the gain drift of the receiver system. A number of analogue signal components were specially designed for the receiver system in order to meet the requirements of the conversion project. One of these components is the compact quad-ridged orthomode transducer, which provides the transmission between the feed horn and the coaxial cables. Its design uses a novel approach to reduce significantly the transition length, while retaining a wide operational bandwidth. Finally we present the design of the complete receiver system, which includes the development work and verification of the components that were built for this project.
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-01-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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