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ATCA Vacation Students Weekend
Over the summer of 1999 to 2000, one was granted the unique opportunity to be employed by the division of Telecommunications and Industrial Physics within CSIRO as part of the Vacation Scholarship program. Under the supervision of Laurie Wilson of at Image and Signal Processing, I was lucky enough to undertake two exciting and rewarding projects that expanded my horizons and my way of thinking.
The Telecommunications and Industrial Physics (TIP) division in CSIRO is based in Sydney, at two sites; namely its base at Marsfield and the National Measurement Laboratory at Lindfield. The Marsfield site is shared with the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) and the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO). TIP deals with many varied aspects of Telecommunications and Physics, from antenna research to research into Medical Imaging. The division developed products traditionally on a pure research basis; however, now sells to a huge commercial market, with its cutting edge technology sold and used all over all over the world.
Antenna CA05
My secondary project was part of the Vacation Scholarship program. As part of the program, vacation scholars at TIP join the other scholars from the ATCA and AAO in undertaking a series of experiments at the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) radiotelescope at Narrabri. I led a small team in designing and implementing a unique and peculiar engineering experiment at the ATCA.
The aim of the investigation was to look into the properties of materials and the behavior of the antennas when such materials are used to attenuate radio sources by being placed at or near the main feed horn. Two pairs of antennas - one pair with the material and one pair without - were used to image a strong radio source. The outputs were compared to see for which and to what extent signals are attenuated by the materials. It is hoped to obtain results useful for both antenna and materials engineering. The experiment is relatively simple, the focus being on how rather than what was done. However, the results were, as expected, widely varying and quite insightful.
Download the full report here
All copyright Bhautik Joshi 2000