Design of a prime-focus 16–26 GHz horn for the Parkes radio telescope

A corrugated horn for the Parkes radio telescope has been optimized to cover the 16–26 GHz band and to provide an efficient illumination of the reflector. Two additional horn to cover the narrower 20–24 GHz and 21.6–22.1 GHz bands have also been designed. The 20–24 GHz and 21.6– 22.1 GHz horns display better G/Tsystem performance as demonstrated by Fig. 7. As the three horns are highly optimised, we also checked that the return loss (RL) did not have any spikes in the band of interest. We have used CST MicroWave Studio to calculate a RL-sweep for each of the horns. As can be seen in Fig. 10, the RL is better than 20 dB across each band for the three horns and do not show any spikes.