RF performance of the GAVRT wideband Radio Telescope (EuCAP 2010)

A wideband Radio Telescope was designed and built for use in the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) program. It uses an existing 34-meter antenna retrofitted with a tertiary offset mirror placed at the apex of the main reflector. It can be rotated to use two feeds that cover the 0.5 to 14 GHz band. The feed for 4.0 to 14.0 GHz is a cryogenically cooled commercially available open boundary quadridge horn from ETS-Lindgren. Coverage from 0.5 to 4.0 GHz is provided by an un-cooled scaled version of the same feed that uses a cooled LNA. The measured performance is greater than 40% over much of the band.