BRAND: Ultra-Wideband Feed Development for the European VLBI Network - A Dielectrically Loaded Decade Bandwidth Quad-Ridge Flared Horn

Paper in proceedings, 2018

We present the design of an ultra-wideband dielectrically loaded Quad-Ridge Flared Horn (QRFH) feed for the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (EVN) developed under the RadioNet project BRoad-bAND (BRAND). The feed covers a frequency bandwidth ratio of 10:1 and has an average aperture efficiency of 50 percent simulated in primary focus setup on the Effelsberg telescope (f/D = 0.3). The feed is dual-polarized and has an input reflection better than −10 dB over the whole 1.5–15.5 GHz frequency band. We also introduce an Analytic-Spline-Hybrid (ASH) optimization scheme for the QRFH ridge and sidewall profiles.