We recently designed a space qualified axial mode helix dish feed that operates in S-Band.
Design challenges included finding a compromise between the compact size of the feed and the wide bandwidth of the helix and dish structure. Both requirements were met by using a partial taper profile over the length of the helix to maintain the size envelope.
We also evaluated the impact of reflector perturbations on axial ratio and peak gain. Although we ended up not using this analysis, using FEKO’s optimizer to capture a larger statistical sample of dish variation vs. performance would be a fairly straight forward process.
ARSI 