Environmental Testing: Behaviour of a Radioreceiver Chain Front-end

The proposed approach has been conceived in order to test and characterize the new receivers developed for the Italian SKA (Square Kilometre Array) demonstrator, based on the re-instrumentation of part of the Northern Cross radio-telescope located in Medicina (Italy). SKA represents a new-generation radio-telescope that will have 1 km2 of effective collecting area. It can be considered as the most sensitive radio-telescope ever built that allows a deeper knowledge of the universe. In order to guarantee the implementation of a reliable radio-receiver chain, we proposed to test the front-end that will be installed in the focal line of the antenna. The front-end has turned out as the most critical subsystem of the radio-receiver chain from a preliminary reliability analysis reported in [1]. For this reason, in the paper some results are obtained by vibration tests as well as shock and water tests are presented in order to prove the performance of the Circuit Under Test (CUT) in particular environmental conditions