Reconstruction of the Excitation of Array Antennas from the Measured Near-Field Intensity using Phase Retrieval

A technique is described to reconstruct the source distribution on an array antenna from the measured radiated intensity and the configuration of the elements. The reconstruction algorithm has been evaluated with measured data from a near-field planar scan of a slotted waveguide array and validated by comparison with the deconvolved holographically reconstructed source distribution. Results are also presented for the phase retrieval diagnosis of a commercial SSR array antenna from 1-dimensional cylindrical near-field measurements.