DEVELOPMENT OF 230 GHZ RADIO RECEIVER SYSTEM FOR SRAO

• Published in: Journal of the Korean astronomical society Vol. 46; no. 6; pp. 225 - 234
• Main Authors: Lee, Jung-Won, Kim, Chang-Hee, Kang, Hyunwoo, Lee, Bangwon, Han, Junghwan, Lee, Seok-Ho, Jeong, Il-Gyo, Koo, Bon-Chul, Park, Yong-Sun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Korean
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: techniques: spectroscopic; telescopes; instrumentation: detectors
• ISSN: 1225-4614; 2288-890X

We develop a radio receiver system operating at ${\lambda}{\sim}1.3$ mm for the 6 m telescope of Seoul Radio Astronomy Observatory. It consists of a dual polarization receiver, a couple of IF processing units, two FFT spectrometers, and associated software. By adopting sideband-separating superconductor mixers with image band terminated to waveguide load at 4.2 K, we achieve $T_{RX}{\leq}100$ K and $T_{sys}$ less than 150 K at best weather condition over 210-250 GHz frequency range. The intermediate frequency signal of 3.5-4.5 GHz is down converted to 0-1 GHz and fed into the FFT spectrometers. The spectrometer covers 1 GHz bandwidth with a spectral resolution of 61 KHz. Test observations are conducted toward several radio sources to evaluate the performance of the system. Aperture and beam efficiencies measured by observing planets are found to be typically 44 ~ 59% and 47 ~ 61%, respectively over the RF band, which are consistent with those measured at 3 mm band previously.