The investigation of a portable solar telescope with a high gain metamaterial antenna for F10.7 radio flux measurement

Abstract

A high gain and high aperture efficiency metamaterial (MTM) antenna is applied to a solar telescope in this paper. First, a portable solar telescope including the MTM antenna and a receiving system is presented. Next, the theory of the MTM antenna is proposed and analyzed based on the ray-tracing model. The designed MTM antenna is composed of a dual circularly polarized Fabry–Pérot resonant antenna (FPRA) and four phase correction metasurfaces (PCMs). The proposed PCMs act as the reflection surface and the phase correction surface at the same time. Every PCM consists of 2 × 18 optimized artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) units. To solve the parallel incidence and narrow bandwidth problems of AMC units, a nonuniform partially reflective surface is designed. Compared with traditional FPRA, the proposed MTM antenna has an increase in peak gain of 37.5% and an aperture efficiency of 11.4%. Then, a receiving system composed of the receiver, equatorial mount, data acquisition module, and display module is presented for solar radio signal processing. Finally, the designed MTM antenna and solar telescope are simulated and measured. A good agreement between the simulation and measurement is observed and can be used to verify this design.