Reflector distortions diagnosis from far-field amplitude pattern

This paper presents a new method for the diagnosis of the deformations of a reflector antenna surface from the radiated far-field amplitude pattern. The method is fully vectorial and allows for working with a shaped beam antenna. The approach exploits a new factorization of the aperture-field distribution and takes into account both the available information concerning the undistorted antenna and the measurement accuracy. Particular care is devoted to the analysis of the well-posedness of the problem and to the avoidance of stagnation points which can trap the algorithm away from the true solution. The effectiveness of the method and its superior performance with respect to the commonly used successive projections algorithms are demonstrated by a numerical analysis