GENERAL NEAR FIELD SYNTHESIS OF REFLECTARRAY ANTENNAS FOR THEIR USE AS PROBES IN CATR

Abstract

In this work, reflectarray antennas are proposed for their use as probes in compact antenna test ranges. For that purpose, the quiet zone generated by a single offset reflectarray is enhanced, overcoming the limitation imposed by the amplitude taper of the feed antenna. First, the near field is characterized by a radiation model which computes the near field of the reflectarray as far field contributions of each element, which are modeled as small rectangular apertures and thus taking into account the active element pattern. Then, a phase only synthesis is performed with the LevenbergMarquardt algorithm in order to improve the size of the generated quiet zone. Due to the nature of the application, this near field synthesis takes into account both the amplitude and phase, making it a more challenging task than an amplitude-only synthesis. The optimization is focused on flattening the amplitude while trying to preserve the phase front generated by the reflectarray.