New Cooled Feeds for the Allen Telescope Array

We developed a new generation of low-noise, broadband feeds for the Allen Telescope Array at the Hat Creek Observatory in Northern California. The new feeds operate over the frequency range 0.9 to 14 GHz. The noise temperatures of the feeds have been substantially improved by cooling the entire feed structure as well as the low-noise amplifiers to 70 K. To achieve this improved performance, the new feeds are mounted in glass vacuum bottles with plastic lenses that maximize the microwave transmission through the bottles. Both the cooled feeds and their low-noise amplifiers produce total system temperatures that are in the range 25–30 K from 1 GHz to 5 GHz and 40–50 K up to 12.5 GHz.