A novel UAV beam measurement system for the SKA1-low telescope

Abstract

This paper presents a verification system to characterize the far-field beam pattern for SKALA4 antenna using a customized drone referred to as FOX. The measurements campaign was conducted to verify one of the important FOX customized features which is the long flight time duration (20 minutes) and investigate FOX capability as a flying far-field source. Apart from describing the FOX drone used in the field trials, the paper discusses the de-embedding algorithm that is used to extract the radiation pattern from the sampled data. The measured radiation pattern of SKALA4 antenna operating at 50 MHz is found to be in good agreement with the fullwave predictions. The results show that this technique is very promising for ongoing and future radio experiments.