Primary Beams of the Meer KAT Radio Telescope: Measurements and Simulations

A comparison of measured and simulated primary beam patterns of the MeerKAT radio telescope is presented. It is shown that the measured data, after removing noise through aperture projection, displays some asymmetry across the apparent symmetry plane of the offset Gregorian reflector structure. This is absent in the simulated results, but the residual between the simulations and measurements is slowly varying, and mainly due to systematic errors in the geometry of the antenna. This effect will be exploited to estimate the beam patterns of the different reflectors in frequency channels where radio frequency interference has corrupted the measured data.