Research on an experimental corrected spherical reflector antenna using cosmic radio sources

The spherical reflector has attracted the attention of antenna designers for many years and many papers have been published on theoretical and experimental investigations of its performance[1,2,3,4]. This paper describes research being conducted on a practical-size antenna to investigate construction techniques, cost advantages, performance and methods for correcting for spherical aberration. The work has followed a logical progression from theoretical to model tests to full-scale antenna. Present effort is concerned with a secondary reflector which corrects for spherical aberration over broad bandwidths. The antenna performance is being evaluated by means of radio star emission that is detected with parametric amplifier Dicke-type radiometers.