Fast Parametric Modeling of Radio Astronomy Reflector Antenna Noise Temperature

This communication presents an approximate method to rapidly estimate the antenna noise temperature of a reflector antenna system as a function of the geometric parameters describing the reflector dishes. The initial estimate is established by neglecting the main reflector from the calculation domain, thus speeding up the calculations significantly. The accuracy may be improved by aligning the estimated results with those from full model simulations, performed at a limited set of points scattered through the parameter space, by a linear regression correction on the residuals. Results of applications on a variety of reflector configurations for some commonly used parameter sets confirm the accuracy of the method to be better than 1%, with speed-ups of more than an order of magnitude typical.