Rapid calculation of antenna noise temperature in offset Gregorian reflector systems

Abstract

Antenna noise temperature calculations of reflector systems is often a slow process and makes direct optimization of the sensitivity of these systems a difficult and time consuming task. This paper presents an improvement to a recently proposed method to speed up these calculations by several orders of magnitude for large dish systems. The accuracy of the improved method is tested for several types of offset Gregorian systems, and errors are shown to be in the order of a few percent. Comparisons of several layers of simplification to a standard brightness temperature model are also presented to aid the designer in the choice of model complexity to use.