Effect of irregular fields on aperture reception characteristics

Formulas are given which describe the receiving properties of an aperture when the incident radiation contains a spatially irregular component, as may arise after propagation through an irregular medium. Results are derived for the degradation of power gain, the variance of the power output and the correlation between the outputs from spaced apertures. Illustrative numerical data are given for the special case of a Gaussian autocorrelation function for the random component of the original signal.