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Cambridge SKALA antenna becomes part of South Pole observatory
from Contact 07
As SKA construction activities start this year, the site of the SKA1-Low telescope in Western Australia will be increasingly peppered with the familiar SKALA4.1 antennas (See Contact Magazine Issue 4).
An earlier version of these low-frequency antennas (SKALA2) has remarkably made its way to an even more remote, and equally environmentally challenging, region of the globe, the South Pole.
A team from the University of Cambridge, who led the Antenna and LNA working group as part of the Dutch-led Low Frequency Aperture Array (LFAA) consortium, have formed a spinoff company, Cambridge ElectroMagnetic Technology Ltd (CEMTL), providing consultancy services building on the team’s experience in antenna design, low noise electronics, phased array systems and electromagnetic modelling. The company also supplies wideband antennas and low noise amplifiers, and has provided SKALA2 antennas for the PeV-Radio project at the South Pole, funded through a European Research Council grant and led by Dr. Frank Schröder at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
A SKALA2 antenna has made it all the way to the South Pole.
Dr Frank Schröder, KIT, and Delaware University.
The antennas are deployed at the IceTop cosmic-ray surface array of the international IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a revolutionary detector encompassing one cubic kilometre of ice, located near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The SKALA2 antennas will further increase the sky coverage of IceTop, to include the centre of our own galaxy. They will also enable a higher accuracy for the detection of atmospheric particle cascades, helping to shed light on their currently unknown origin.
“We are thrilled to see SKALA antennas used in applications beyond astronomy”, says Dr Eloy de Lera Acedo, co-founder and director, CEMTL. “After leading the antenna design team in the consortium, we are excited to embark on this new adventure with Cambridge Electromagnetic Technology Ltd. and are now focused on expanding the impact of the SKALA technology in other markets.”
By Dr Hilary Kay (The University of Manchester - UK SKA)
Model of a SKALA4 antenna, developed as part of the design work for the SKA-Low telescope.
