Evaluation of Phase Calibration Performance with KVN

  • Published : 2016.10.12

Abstract

In mm-VLBI, the quality of observation data is largely affected by atmospheric effect. The most challenging matter is that the phase of correlator output fluctuates rapidly resulting from a variation of atmospheric propagation delay. Consequently, it is demanding to achieve high Signal-to-Noise ratio by integrating data in time domain before calibrating atmospheric delay. However, Korean VLBI Network (KVN) has a unique system to make a 4-frequency (22/43/86/129 GHz) simultaneous observation in mm-wavelength and Frequency Phase Transfer (FPT) calibration technique has effectively removed atmospheric delay in the simultaneous multi-frequency observation of the KVN. For astrometric and astrophysical studies, we evaluated the FPT performance of KVN in various observing conditions. Using the total 38 bright AGNs, we have compared atmospheric conditions such as ground-based weather information, system temperature, atmospheric delay with the calibration results of FPT at 22/43/86/129 GHz during the five experiments in 2013, and quantified its performance in terms of coherence function and Allan variance. We present the analysis result of the relation between the FPT performance and observing conditions.

Keywords