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Reflector antenna

Problem Description

Reflector antennas are typically used when very high gain (e.g. satellite transmission or reception) or a very narrow main beam (e.g. secure communication) is required. Gain is improved and the main beam narrowed with increase in the reflector size.  Large reflectors are, however, difficult to simulate as they become very large in terms of wavelength.

FEKO Solution

FEKO is well suited to the numerical analysis of reflector antennas and provides the following accurate high frequency techniques as options for reflector simulation:

• Multilevel Fast Multipole Method (MLFMM).
• Physical Optics (PO).
  

Users with limited computation resources or extremely large reflectors may use approximation techniques to perform their simulations:

• Domain decomposition where the feed antenna is simulated in isolation and the result used to replace the feed antenna with an equivalent source when the reflector is simulated.
• Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) which places no restrictions on reflector size.