Beam calibration of radio telescopes with drones

Understand

We present a multi-frequency far-field beam map for the 5m dish telescope at the Bleien Observatory measured using a commercially available drone.

• We describe the hexacopter drone used in this experiment, the design of the flight pattern, and the data analysis scheme.
• This is the first application of this calibration method to a single dish radio telescope in the far-field.
• The high signal-to-noise data allows us to characterise the beam pattern with high accuracy out to at least the 4th side-lobe.