Equivalence of surface current and aperture field integrations for reflector antennas

Abstract

The "extinction theorem" is used to prove that the fields of reflector antennas determined by integration of the current on the illuminated surface of the reflector are identical to the fields determined by aperture field integration with the Kottler-Franz formulas over any surface <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">S_{a}</tex> that caps the reflector. As a corollary to this equivalence theorem, the fields predicted by integration of the physical optics (PO) surface currents and the Kottler-Franz integration of the geometrical optics (GO) aperture fields on <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">S_{a}</tex> agree to within the locally plane-wave approximation inherent in PO and GO. Moreover, within the region of accuracy of the fields predicted by PO current or GO aperture field integration, the far fields predicted by the Kottler-Franz aperture integration are closely approximated by the far fields obtained from aperture integration of the tangential electric or magnetic field alone. In particular, discrepancies in symmetry between the far fields of offset reflector antennas obtained from PO current and GO aperture field integrations disappear when the aperture of integration is chosen to cap (or nearly cap) the reflector.