Search of the Methods for Calibrating the Single-Antenna Tracking/Pointing and Baselines of Pairs of Antennas

The Chinese Solar Radio Heliograph is an interferometric array consisting of 100 parabolic antennas with a 3km maximum baseline which allows it to obtain images at chosen frequencies ranging from 400MHz to 15GHz.The observing site will be at the town of Ming An Tu in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.This paper describes the methods of how to calibrate the tracking/pointing and baselines.For the pointing and tracking of a single antenna, the calibrations can be achieved to have the residual rms pointing errors within 22", by (i) observing the radio source Cassiopeia A or Cygnus A to find the maximum-flux direction as the reference to correct the pointing of the antenna, (ii) tracking observations of the GPS satellites and well-documented radio sources, and (iii) using an 8-parameter calibration method that has been effectively applied to the Korean Solar Radio Burst Locator (KSRBL).After the pointings/trackings of single antennas are calibrated in this way, the baselines of pairs of antennas can be calibrated with a method as illustrated in the"Interferometry and Synthesis in Radio Astronomy" by A.R.Thompsom et al.The residual errors of the baselines are less than ~1 mm.