Understanding Aperture Efficiency for Reflector Antennas Using the Poynting Streamline Method

In most analysis methods, the reflector antennas are usually modeled and understood as transmitters, while the receiving characteristics are approximated using the Geometrical Optics (GO) methods. The Poynting streamline method based on full-wave analysis uses the streamlines of Poynting vectors to represent the trajectory of field energy near the receiving antenna. Through the analysis of a horn antenna feed and a planar array feed, the aperture efficiency of the reflector antenna can be intuitively visualized by comparing the geometry of the effective area to the physical shape of the reflector antenna.