Validation of Blended Rolled Edge Reflector Characteristics for Compact Test Ranges

Abstract

This paper presents a recent advance in designing and validating blended rolled edge (BRE) reflectors for compact antenna test range (CATR) applications. BRE reflectors offer the potential of very smooth near-field patterns in the quiet zone (QZ) due to their improved diffraction characteristics. In house equivalent currents based physical optics (PO) simulation code results were compared and validated against Altair Feko Method of Moment (MoM) simulations for various BRE reflectors. Reflector comparisons have been shown for different modelling scenarios, eg. imported CAD files versus surface created using Lua macros coding, which is a built-in macros language in Altair Feko. All results are in a very good agreement, including cross polar magnitude and phase.