Current capabilities for the full-wave electromagnetic modelling of dishes for SKA

A number of new radio telescope designs, operating in the low-GHz regime, are currently under construction or in the pre-construction phase, in particular SKA precursor instruments and now SKA1-mid. This paper demonstrates the application of full wave computational electromagnetic analysis techniques - in particular the MLFMM - to the modelling of radio telescope dishes in this frequency band. Results are compared to asymptotic analyses. It has been shown that full-wave analysis can now be routinely applied to such designs.