Finally, we're getting somewhere.

So, i finally met the professor whom i've been stalking for almost 3 weeks now! I kept mailing the prof and swinging by his room, hoping that he'd be there. And last wednesday, i finally met him, Prof. HSR, a professor in the Elec Dept at IIT Madras. He's known to be a pundit on antenna design and simulations. When i started working on the radio astronomy project, as senior had asked me to contact him regarding any doubts and more fundamentally, the direction in which my project would head. 

 well, now that i've finally met him, i did get quite a few doubts cleared and know what i'm supposed to be doing in the coming months! 

 Apparently, as i suspected, the response function of the antenna or the gain from the antenna is frequency dependent and trying to deconvolute the signal (in the frequency spectrum) from the antenna without the proper response function is moot! 

 Also, in addition to the response function, the effective aperture of the antenna is also frequency dependent and we have to take this into effect as well when we're temporally deconvoluting the signal. 

 Simulating the radiation pattern will help us understand the effective aperture of the antenna and we need to similarly simulate the response function of the antenna as well. 

 These parameters will be different for different antenna designs like yagi-uda, half-wave dipoles etc. So, the next step of my project will be to try and decide on the best antenna architecture for my antenna so that i have good gain through my observation band. 

 And this is where we have one more twist. 

 There are certain antenna structures which will give us a frequency dependent response function i.e the gain from the antenna will be the same over a huuuge band, of the order of ~200MHz. They are rather hard to construct but once we take care of that, we have one less problem to worry about when we're dealing with the data. 

 Anyway, for now he has asked me to understand finite element method and it's use in simulating the radiation pattern of an antenna. i will have to understand the response function as well. 

 Along side, i am looking for a good low noise amplifier and i'm trying to compare my method of retrieving data from the antenna to the method mentioned in the radio jove manual. 

 It seems to be quite a bit of work. 
And believe me it is... 

 Let's see how of it i get done this semester...  

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