Antenna performance analysis for decameter solar radio observations

Decameter wavelength radio emission is finely structured in solar bursts. For their research it is very important to use a sufficient sensitivity of antenna systems. In this paper we study an influence of the radiotelescope‐antenna effective area on the results of decameter solar radio observations. For this purpose we compared the solar bursts received by the array of 720 ground‐based dipoles and the single dipole of the radiotelescope UTR‐2. It is shown that a larger effective area of the ground‐based antenna allows us to measure a weaker solar emission and to distinguish a fine structure of strong solar events. This feature has been also verified by simultaneous ground‐ and space‐based observations in the overlapping frequency range (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)