The development of low-frequency radio astronomy experiments for detecting 21-cm line emission from hydrogen presents new opportunities for creative solutions to the challenge of characterizing an antenna beam pattern. The Array of Long Baseline Antennas for Taking Radio Observations from the Seventy-ninth parallel (ALBATROS) is a new radio interferometer sited in the Canadian high Arctic that aims to map Galactic foregrounds at frequencies below ∼30 MHz. We present PteroSoar, a custom-built hexacopter outfitted with a transmitter, that will be used to characterize the beam patterns of ALBATROS and other experiments. The PteroSoar drone hardware is motivated by the need for user-servicing at remote sites and environmental factors that are unique to the high Arctic. In particular, magnetic heading is unreliable because the magnetic field lines near the north pole are almost vertical. We therefore implement moving baseline real time kinematic (RTK) positioning with two GPS units to obtain heading solutions with ∼1∘ accuracy. We present a preliminary beam map of an ALBATROS antenna, thus demonstrating successful PteroSoar operation in the high Arctic.
@article{arxiv.2407.00856,
title = {Drone-Based Antenna Beam Calibration in the High Arctic},
author = {Lawrence Herman and Christopher Barbarie and Mohan Agrawal and Vlad Calinescu and Simon Chen and H. Cynthia Chiang and Cherie K. Day and Eamon Egan and Stephen Fay and Kit Gerodias and Maya Goss and Michael Hétu and Daniel C. Jacobs and Marc-Olivier R. Lalonde and Francis McGee and Loïc Miara and John Orlowski-Scherer and Jonathan Sievers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.00856},
year = {2024}
}