Antenna Performance Analysis for Decameter Solar Radio Observations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the effective area of antennas influences the sensitivity and detail of decameter solar radio observations, demonstrating that larger antenna arrays improve detection of weak signals and fine structures.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of antenna effective area impacts on solar radio burst measurements, highlighting the advantages of larger arrays over single dipoles.

Findings

Larger antenna arrays detect weaker solar emissions.

Enhanced antenna effective area reveals fine structures in solar bursts.

Results verified through simultaneous ground- and space-based observations.

Abstract

Decameter wavelength radio emission is finely structured in solar bursts. For their research it is very important to use a sufficient sensitivity of antenna systems. In this paper we study an influence of the radiotelescope-antenna effective area on the results of decameter solar radio observations. For this purpose we compared the solar bursts received by the array of 720 ground-based dipoles and the single dipole of the radiotelescope UTR-2. It's shown that a larger effective area of the ground-based antenna allows us to measure a weaker solar emission and to distinguish a fine structure of strong solar events. This feature has been also verified by simultaneous ground- and space-based observations in the overlapping frequency range.