Diseño y Caracterización de un Array Activo de Banda Ancha para Radioastronomía

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio-telescope will become a reality in 2020. Nowadays, many research groups are validating the technologies that will be necessary to build this enormous instrument. In order to cover the bandwidth between 70 MHz and 10 GHz, different antenna array designs and configurations will be used. This paper presents the design and characterization of a planar aperture array based on bunny-ear antennas, whose design is proposed to cover the midfrequency range of the telescope (from 300 to 1000 MHz). One of the main advantages of the present solution is its fully differential nature, which avoids the use of passive baluns, although it requires some especial considerations during the design and measurement processes.