Full-wave analysis of the expanded very large array

Abstract

© 2017 IEEE. In this work we present the full-wave analysis of the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) radio telescope. The analysis methods include that offered by the commercial electromagnetic simulation software package, FEKO, using solvers such as the multi-level fast multipole method (MLFMM) and iterative MLFMM / large element physical optics (LE-PO) techniques. The aforementioned solvers exhibit different memory and runtime performances, as well as varying accuracy levels with which parameters such as the polarisation and gain of the radio telescope can be calculated. The purpose of this work is to review these methods in more detail, when applied to a large structure such as the EVLA.