Antenna Beam Modeling

[tmolteno]

This is an important part of enhanced calibration as well as new inference algorithms. This issue is a placeholder. Andre Offringa suggests EveryBeam as a package that can model beam patterns. Meerkat uses FITS images - however Andre says this is inefficient as one needs a different image for each antenna and each frequency and for each elevation. By expanding the beam in basis functions, one can interpolate in frequency space to calculate beams at different frequencies.

• Choose a technique (FITS or Basis functions). Tim prefers the latter.
• Be able to generate a fits image from the basis functions, so that other packages can be used for imaging.
• Allow modeling to determine beam packages (e.g. from Numerical EM packages) so reading output from FEKO might be useful.