The Room Temperature Multi-Channel Heterodyne Receiver Section of the PHAROS2 Phased Array Feed

Abstract

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and test results of a room temperature multi-channel heterodyne receiver operating across the 2.3–8.2 GHz radiofrequency (RF) band. Such a “Warm Section” (WS) receiver is part of phased arrays for reflector observing systems 2 (PHAROS2), a C-band phased array feed (PAF) demonstrator with digital beamformer for radio astronomy application. The WS receiver is cascaded to the PHAROS2 cryostat, which includes an array of Vivaldi antennas with low noise pre-amplification stages. The WS can handle up to 32 RF signals and, for each of them, realizes the operations of filtering, RF amplification, and down-conversion from the RF to the 375–650 MHz intermediate frequency (IF). Also, the WS incorporates an IF-to-optical signal conversion through analogue wavelength division multiplexing IF over fiber (IFoF) and fiber-optic transmitters (OTXs). The 32-channel WS receiver consists of four eight-channel WS RF/IF modules, one local oscillator (LO) splitter module and one monitoring and control module, all hosted in a standard 6U × 19-inch rack.