System noise calculations over the decade bandwidth of the Eleven feed for radio telescope applications

Paper in proceeding, 2010

The ability to cool the entire system improves system performance by a factor of two to four times; for the cooled case. This requires ambient systems to increase reflector diameters in proportion to achieve similar sensitivity. Additionally, the requirements on matching are relaxed in cooled systems, as the not-included variation of the LNA due to the noise mismatch is much smaller in a cooled system than in a non-cooled system. The calculations presented provide a meaningful reference to quickly compare systems, for both engineers and scientists. However, further work is ongoing into more accurate noise models and computer simulations. There is also ongoing work to verify results experimentally.