Revisiting the Location of Phase Center of Reflector Antennas

The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the location of phase center of reflector antennas. Analytical equations that can provide an initial estimate of the phase center are revisited and the dependency of the phase center on the reflector geometry (aperture diameter, focal length and offset height) are highlighted. These formulations, however, do not account for several factors such as the illumination characteristics, wavelength of operation, feed position, etc. In this work, the analytical equations are improved to incorporate the effect of feed illumination taper. The effectiveness of these equations are then assessed by employing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to optimize the phase center based on the far-field data generated via full-wave simulations.