Concept Design Of An 80 Dual-Polarization-Element Cryogenic Phased Array Camera For The Arecibo Radio Telescope

This paper presents the current concept design for ALPACA (Advanced L-Band Phased Array Camera for Arecibo) an L-Band cryo-phased array instrument proposed for the 305 m radio telescope of Arecibo. It includes the cryogenically cooled front-end with 160 low noise amplifiers, a RF-over-fiber signal transport and a digital beam former with an instantaneous bandwidth of 312.5 MHz per channel. The camera will digitally form 40 simultaneous beams inside the available field of view of the Arecibo telescope optics, with an expected system temperature goal of 30 K.