SKA-Low station beam response simulator

The SKA-Low telescope is designed to provide flexibility in how system elements are combined to support a wide variety of scientific experiments. For example, each station, consisting of 256 antennas, can operate together in full-station mode or be divided into subsets to form substations. Configuring an SKA-Low subarray with substations provides astronomers with access to larger fields of view and shorter baseline lengths than are possible with full-station subarrays.

To assist with observation planning, we have built a Python package to simulate the beam response at a given frequency and pointing direction for an arbitrary selection of antennas in a given SKA-Low station. Users can optionally apply antenna apodisation or other weighting schemes to shape the station beam.

The simulator uses the FEKO Embedded Element Pattern (EEP) to estimate the beam response. The software package is hosted at https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/ost/ska-ost-sim-low-station-beam. A supplemental Jupyter Notebook provides an overview of the currently available functionalities. 

In addition to the Python package, we have also deployed an interactive web app (see https://ska-low-station-beam-simulator.skao.int/ ) that allows you to interactively define a station configuration and then to visualise the corresponding beam response for a given frequency, pointing direction, and polarisation. 

In this initial release, both the Python package and the web app allow users to estimate the beam responses at 100, 200, and 300 MHz. Support for other frequencies will be added in future versions. 

We welcome feedback from users. Please send comments or suggestions to sciops@skao.int.