Drone Characterization Approach for Radio Telescopes

A flying artificial source has been used to present a multi-frequency far-field beam map for a 5 m radio dish telescope at the University of Malta, in its real installation conditions. The resulting 2D beam pattern is compared with that derived from numerical simulations in CST Microwave Studio, a commercial software package based on the finite difference in time domain FDTD. This paper also describes the verification system, the design of the fight pattern, and the data analysis process exploited in this experiment. The results of this method are promising for ongoing high-accuracy cosmological and astronomical experiments.