Design for Array-Fed Beam-Scanning Reflector Antennas With Maximum Radiated Power Efficiency Based on Near-Field Pattern Synthesis by Support Vector Machine

The maximum radiation efficiency can be obtained when the feed array excitation of a reflector antenna is synthesized by the conjugate field matching (CFM) method. However, the CFM method can only get the strongly tapered feeding power distribution. This will lead to most of power amplifiers (PAs) working in low efficiency states and reduce the equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) with the limited power consumption. In this work, combining the radiation efficiency and the PA efficiency, the radiated power efficiency (RPE) is defined as the new design goal and is to be raised to achieve higher EIRP. For this reason, a method based on the near-field pattern synthesis is proposed. In this method, all the ON-state PAs are required to work in the highest efficiency state. Then, with well-trained support vector machine (SVM), the ON–OFF states of the PAs are adjusted so that the reflected focal field can be better synthesized by the near-field pattern of the feed array. Thus, the loss of the radiation efficiency is minimized. As a result, the RPE is about 22% higher than that of the CFM method and about 10% higher than that of the optimum CFM truncation case.