Wei Wang, Yihua Yan, Jian Zhang, Zhijun Chen, Fei Liu, Yujiang Liu
National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Datun Road A20, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100012, China
The imaging of solar radio emissions at dm-cm wave range is important to understand the energy release, converter and transmission processes in the solar atmosphere. It has long been expected to build a radioheliograph in China and a new Chinese radioheliograph project (CSRH) at multiple frequencies in the dm-cm wave range with 100 antennas is proposed. The CSRH will be a solar-dedicated radio interferometric array that will be optimized to carry out imaging spectroscopy of the Sun, to produce high spatial resolution, high time resolution and high frequency resolution images of the Sun simultaneously at a wide range of frequencies. A prototype study of 2-element interferometer has been built and tested for overall design since 2004. The prototype system includes 2 4.5m antennas, feed and LNA (low noise amplifier), optical transmitter, optical fibril, optical receiver, RF (radio frequency) receiver, and digital correlator receiver. First results of interference fringes of radio signals from a weather satellite (Chinese FY-2) and the Sun from the 2-element prototype system were successfully obtained on 5 Feb 2005. The observed fringe rate in this test is in good agreement with the theoretical values, and the observed data corresponded well with our simulation. Furthermore, the progress about this project is also introduced in the present work.