Beam calibration of radio telescopes with drones

TL;DR

This paper introduces a drone-based method for calibrating the beam pattern of a radio telescope, achieving high accuracy measurements that outperform traditional calibration techniques.

Contribution

First application of drone-based calibration to a single dish radio telescope, providing a new, precise, and efficient method for beam characterization.

Findings

High signal-to-noise beam maps out to 4th side-lobe

Drone calibration matches traditional methods with high accuracy

Method is promising for future radio astronomy experiments

Abstract

We present a multi-frequency far-field beam map for the 5m dish telescope at the Bleien Observatory measured using a commercially available drone. We describe the hexacopter drone used in this experiment, the design of the flight pattern, and the data analysis scheme. This is the first application of this calibration method to a single dish radio telescope in the far-field. The high signal-to-noise data allows us to characterise the beam pattern with high accuracy out to at least the 4th side-lobe. The resulting 2D beam pattern is compared with that derived from a more traditional calibration approach using an astronomical calibration source. We discuss the advantages of this method compared to other beam calibration methods. Our results show that this drone-based technique is very promising for ongoing and future radio experiments, where the knowledge of the beam pattern is key to obtaining high-accuracy cosmological and astronomical measurements.