Institute of Sensors Signals and Systems, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK.
Antenna and Sub-Millimetre Waves Section, European Space Agency, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 27;23(3):1425. doi: 10.3390/s23031425.
HERAS is a tool developed in Matlab for the analysis of reflector antennas using physical optics (PO) theory. Its graphical user interface (GUI) and source code are freely available for educational and research purposes. It has the necessity of being a flexible tool to provide adaptability to system engineering requirements and can also be of interest to antenna engineers working on the design of reflector antennas. Due to the increasing demand of broadband services, satellite communications systems are becoming highly complex in order to meet connectivity requirements. To fully exploit the benefits of these systems, multidimensional optimisations are crucial, which call for an efficient estimation of the coverage characteristics. Reflector-based solutions are one of the preferred architectures for very high-throughput satellite (VHTS) systems. A detailed description of HERAS is presented in this paper which has been validated with available commercial software packages. In addition, some examples are described in which the tool has been used for the efficient estimation of VHTS systems performance.
HERAS 是一个使用物理光学 (PO) 理论分析反射器天线的 Matlab 工具。其图形用户界面 (GUI) 和源代码可免费用于教育和研究目的。它必须是一个灵活的工具,以提供对系统工程要求的适应性,并且对于从事反射器天线设计的天线工程师也可能感兴趣。由于对宽带服务的需求不断增加,卫星通信系统变得非常复杂,以满足连接性要求。为了充分利用这些系统的优势,多维优化至关重要,这需要对覆盖特性进行有效的估计。基于反射器的解决方案是超高吞吐量卫星 (VHTS) 系统的首选架构之一。本文对 HERAS 进行了详细描述,并通过可用的商业软件包进行了验证。此外,还描述了一些示例,其中该工具已用于高效估计 VHTS 系统的性能。