Parameter Measurements for the 20m Antenna by Means of Radio Astronomical Methods

This paper reports a radio astronomical method for antenna parameters' measurement.It is composed,of a total-power radiometer,room temperature and cryogenically-cooled microwave black bodies as the primary standard of noise source,a solid-state coaxial noise-source as the secondary standard,data acquisition and processing equipments incloding a microcomputer,and the quasi-optic technique by which the calibrative noise is injected from the space.By means of this method we measured parameters of a 20-m satellite communications antenna incloding the antenna noise temperature,the antenna aperture efficiency,the half-power beamwidth,etc.The measuring results show that this set of methods is simple,practical,highly precise and worth to spread.