Highly Sensitive Phased Array Receivers for Radio Astronomy, Radar, and Wireless Communications

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Phased arrays have been used for over a century in direction finding, radar, and communications. More recently, challenging performance requirements for applications like radio astronomy and satellite communications have led to new progress in the field of antenna arrays. When the signal environment is dominated by ambient noise and interference, improving the efficiency of the antenna does not increase performance much. When the signal comes from the sky, the situation is different. Radio astronomy and satellite communications systems require low-noise electronics and antennas with high aperture efficiency, radiation efficiency, and spillover efficiency. Horns and parabolic dishes are low cost and highly efficient, whereas phased arrays and adaptive antennas offer electronic beam steering and can selectively receive signals of interest. Many phased array designs for terrestrial wireless communications are too lossy, noisy, and inefficient for applications that need high sensitivity. The BYU Radio Astronomy Systems research group has combined numerical modeling, antenna design optimization, network theory, microwave noise analysis, and array signal processing theory to design high sensitivity phased array antenna systems. This research has been incorporated into the IEEE’s governing standards for antennas, enabling new instrumentation for scientific observations, phased arrays for mobile satellite communications, and the development of some of the most sensitive phased arrays ever demonstrated.