Cost Effective Frequency Ranges For Multi-Beam Dishes, Cylinders, Aperture Arrays, and Hybrids

Five out of six Square Kilometre Array (SKA) science programs need extensive surveys at frequencies below 1.4 GHz and only four need high-frequency observations. The latter ones drive to expensive high surface accuracy collecting area, while the former ask for multi-beam receiver systems and extensive post correlation processing. In this paper, we analyze the system cost of a SKA when the field-of-view (Fov) is extended from 1 deg² at 1.4 GHz to 200 deg² at 0.7 GHz for three different antenna concepts. We start our analysis by discussing the fundamental limitations and cost issues of wide-band focal plane arrays (FPA) in dishes and cylinders and of wide-band receptors in aperture arrays. We will show that a hybrid SKA in three different antenna technologies will give the highest effective sensitivity for all six key science programs.