Designing shaped dual reflector antenna system by ray tracing method

In the radio astronomy applications, antennas having the highest aperture efficiencies are requested. In order to meet the request, a reflector shaping program for dual reflector antennas has been developed. The conventional ray tracing method is employed in the developed program. Recently, the fourth generation programming language MATLAB is well known for its numerical computing environment and very useful three dimensional data display functions. The authors wished to make a dual reflector shaping program by a ray tracing method on MATLAB. In this paper, details of the program are explained. And antenna ray tracing results are shown visually by three dimensional viewgraphs. Moreover, some calculated examples such as dual reflector shapes and radiation patterns depending on aperture distributions are shown. It is shown that the uniform aperture distribution that gives the highest aperture efficiency can be achieved by the reflector shaping program. Moreover, accuracies of the developed program are ensured through calculated results of radiation patterns.