 | |
Interferometers vs. single dishes |
á
| | The formula for |
from above is valid for a 2-element interferometer. á
| |  |
á
| | A single dish with the same effective area as the pair of interferometer antenna, but otherwise exactly the same instrumental setup, would perform better by a factor of |
. á
| | However, interferometers can get close to compensating for this disadvantage. |
á
| | The full formula for the imaging sensitivity of an interferometer is |
á
| |  |
á
| | |
is the number of baselines in the interferometer. If at any time the input signal of each antenna is correlated with that of each of the others, the total number of baselines is á
|  |  |
á
| | For large numbers of N, this term approaches |
/2, which leads to the formula valid for single dishes. á
| |
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