Rigorous analysis of practical reflector antennas

Perhaps the most ubiquitous numerical tool used in the analysis of reflector antennas is the physical optics technique. Although this approximate technique typically predicts the radiation patterns of reflector antennas with excellent accuracy, there are numerous situations where rigorous analysis methods are desirable. The rigorous analysis of reflector antennas using the method of moments has been accomplished in the past. However, the majority of the work has been limited to electrically small reflectors, or antennas with axial-symmetry. In this work a technique for rigorously analyzing relatively large practical reflector antennas, with as many as 100,000 surface current elements, is presented. This tool is based on an iterative integral equation solver and can rigorously handle offset multireflector antennas in their entirety (including all reflectors, surfaces, struts, feed, and feed support hardware). To demonstrate the tool´s performance, computed radiation patterns are compared with measured and physical optics generated radiation patterns.