Inverse Surface-Source Solutions for Very Large Antennas — The One Thousand Wavelength Aperture

Abstract

Inverse source and in particular inverse surface-source solutions can rather easily be obtained for irregularly sampled observation data collected with arbitrary measurement probes. This gives the opportunity to perform near-field (NF) far-field (FF) transformations for a wide collection of measurement setups if the related computational effort can be afforded. It is shown that inverse source solvers with multilevel fast multipole method (MLFMM) acceleration and normal-error (NE) arrangement of the normal equation system can provide reliable inverse source solutions of very large aperture antennas with very good error control.