Simulate 430 linefeed gain vs za
apr12
The 430 MHz line feed on the
carriage house illuminates the 1000 foot dish when the ch is
at za=0. As the ch goes up in za, the illumination on the dish
spills over onto the ground/ground screen. Since the gain is
proportional to the illuminated area (assuming uniform illumination)
the gain will also go down. To figure out how the spillover
increases with za, a simulation was done. This simulation used:
- compute rgrid which is a 600x600 grid of points spaced by 1
meter.
- Fill rgrid with the distance from each point to the center.
- Generate a aperture plane agrid(600x600) for za = 0
- use rgrid to find all of the points in agrid that have
a radius between 305/2 meters and 91/2 meters (300 foot
diameter).
- This is the part of the aperture plane illuminated by the
linefeed when za=0.
- Fill these points with unity.
- integrate over the entire agrid0
- Figure out how much the aperture plane moves in the x
direction when the feed moves to a non zero zenith angle.
- Approximate this by looking at the triangle :
- angleEdge=asin(305/2 / radiusCurvature) = 35.0795 degrees
.. angle to edge of dish.
- r1=radiusCurvature*cos(angleEdge) .. height edge of
dish to center of curvature
- r2=305/2 : radius of dish
- th=angleEdge + za
- solve tan(th)=(r2+dx)/r1 this give the x shift of
the aperture plane.
- compute rgrid1(600,600). this has the radius for each point
to the center of the dish, with the x coordinate shifted by
dx.
- Find all of the points in rgrid1 within 305/2 meters of the
center.
- Use these indices to integrate over agrid0 (the aperture
plane at za=00
- The normalized gain(za)= total(aperature plane at
za)/total(aperture plane za=0).
The plots show the change
in area (gain) as a function of za. (.ps) (.pdf):
- Page 1: Illuminated area (gain) vs za.
- The black line is the simulated data. The red line is a
linear fit to the data.
- The slope of the fit is -.0326 per deg za.
- Page 2: Measured gain vs za for linefeed.
- Data is from 20050301 thru 20120229
- black is the measured gain. The red line is a linear fit to
the data: gain= C0 + C1*za
- The data is centered at 430 MHz.
- Each frame is a different bandwidth: 12.5,6.25,3.125,1.5625
MHz.
- the fractional slope : C1/C0 should match the
slope of the line from the simulation:
- simulation: -.0326
- measured data:-.0288 to -.0295 ..
- so the match is pretty good.
- The gain increases as the bandwidth narrows since the
linefeed has a fwhm response of about 9.5 MHz. centered close
to 430MHz.
Summary:
- simulation shows that the fractional change in gain with za
for the line feed is:
- Using the measured gain from the carriage house we get a
normalized slope of:
- -.0288 to -.0295 * zaDeg. This agrees pretty well with
the simulation
- The measured gain of the linefeed has a fwhm of about
9.5 MHz (centered at 429.5 MHz).
- What was not included in the simulation.
- The true illumination patter probably has a taper. This
would weight the area spilling over at the edge with a smaller
value
- So the simulation would come closer to the measured value.
processing:
x101/430ch/herbc/sim430LinefeedGainVsZa.pro
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