IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Newsletter, December 1989

Hal Schrank
Division IV PACE Director
Westinghouse Electric Corp.
14414 Cube Road
Hunt Valley, MD 21030
(301) 584-2822
Mats E. Viggh
The Scalar Feed-History region between the feed and the reflector in a conical
and Perspectives "shroud (see Figure 1). That would effectively
the feed from thermal noise emitted by the ground.
screen
Muts E. Viggh
T h e Analytic Sciences Corporation On the other hand, there weresome uncertainties
55 Walkers Brook Drive about other features of the radiation pattern for such
Reading, Massachusetts 01867 an antenna. A scale-modelexperiment would have been
the ideal approach to clarifying those,and TRG Inc.
was asked to submit a proposal. As a member of the TRG
T he Scalar Feed was first conceived in 1962. This
article reviews the development process,aswell
the fundamental properties and limitations of the de-
as technical
staff at the time, I took part in the evalu-
ation of the request for bid. We
had the necessary
vice,whicheventually became knownas the corrugated millimeter wave test equipment, andreadyaccess to a
suitable pattern range, but fabricatin a scale model
conicalhorn.
flector, with the required surface
P
was another matter. To make an o fset parabolic re-
tolerances, was
THE BACKGROUND
simply not feasible in the days when
numerically-
Before 1960, feeds for parabolic reflectors and controlled machinery had not become practical.
other quasi-optical
microwave antennas wereusually Thus, TRG had to make a "no b i d response. That
designed for maximumon-axispowergain.Whilesome did not sit too wellwith our Vice President, Dr. Alan
attention was paid to the level of close-in sidelobes, F. Kay. He decided to put on his thinkinghat. As was
those far from the main beam were of no concern,ex- usually the casewhen Alan did that, he cameupwith
cept 111 Jammmng scenarios. In particular, the fact somenovelideas.
that some far-out sidelobes may pick up thermal noise
from the grounddidnotimpactsystem performance m THE ALTERNATnTE
an era when the excess receiver noise temperatures
were several thou- sands of degrees Kelvin. In retroqect, it wouldseem
likely that Alan Kay
posed to lmself these questions:
The advent of satellite communicationschanged
all that. Suddenly, the "gain-over-noise temperature" Is it really
necessary to shield the whole
(G/T) ratio became the key performance measure for the volume between feed and reflector?
ground station antennas. That, in turn, led to the de-
velopment of the Scalar Feed. Would not a shroud that extends part of the
way do almost as well?
THE CHALLENGE
Might it be possible to make the shroudshort
Forthe TELSTAR Satellite, AT&T decided on the enough to use the concept for center-fed para-
"cornucopia" antenna as the ultimate solution to a low bolic reflectors?
G/T ratio. The basic idea was to enclose the entire
Whether or not thisis a true representation of Alan's
thought
process, his
next step was to perform an ex-
periment alongthoselines.However, that didnotcome
out verywell.
The test object was a conical "funnel" attached
to a cylindricalwaveguide, as illustrated in Figure
2. Its H-plane pattern displayed the desired charac-
teristics: a smoothmain beam and a rapidlydecreasing
level for off-axis angles larger than the cone half
angle. On the other hand, the E-plane pattern wassim-
plyawful, but it didnot take long for Alan to figure
out why.
In the E-plane, the transverseH-field is tan-
Figure 1 A pyramidal horn-reflector antenna with a 20 foot aperture gential to the conicalsurface. That results in radial
designed by A. B. Crawford for the Echo and Telstar satellite com- currents which are approximately proportional to 1/R,
munications experiments (circa1960); eventually usedfor confirmation where R is the distance to the tip of the cone. Where
at 4 GHz of the 3k Big Bang isotropic cosmic background radiation; the coneends, these currents will set uposcillating
located at Crawford Hills, N.J. charges. As indicated in Figure 2, these then form two
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 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Newsletter, December 1989

d-m 4--

Figure 3 Proper Scalar Feed operation requires a spherical wavefront

at the horn aperture. Unless the distance “d” exceeds X/2, the radia-
tion pattern will be similar to that of an equi-phase aperture.

Figure 2 Radial currents cause “parasitic” radiation sources which

con-
tribute to pattern distortions in the E-plane.
tical and experimental investigations were performed
“parasitic“ sources of radiation, spaced many
wave- to establish the limitations of the Scalar Feed con-
lengths apart, and each radiating over a relatively cept. Those were focused on defining the design par-
wide angular region. No wonder that the E-plane pat- ameters which set the upper and lowerfrequencylimits
terns looked awful! for satisfactory erformance. In addition, extensions
of the original conk&uration were explored.
At the time, TRG washeavilyinvolved in research
on electromagnetic surface waves. The concept of con- The main function of the corrugated conical sur-
trolling current flow on a planar surface by means of face is to contain the fields radiated by the feeding
“corrugations” had been well established in that con- wave ide within the solid angle defined by the cone.
text.When Alan Kay called a brainstormingsession to As t?l e frequency increases, the main beam of the wave-
mull over the apparent failure of the ”wide flare guide radiation pattern will eventually become nar-
horn“ concept, that experience spawned a suggestion. rower than the opening angle of the cone. At that
How about cuttinggrooves in the conicalsurface,nom- oint, the cone can
no longer performits intended
inally a quarter wavelength deep? That should reduce Function and the upper frequency limit for proper
those longitudinal currents significantly.
Alan
picked Scalar Feed operation has been exceeded.
up on the idea and set the wheels in motion to imple-
ment it. The lower fre uency
limit for a Scalar Feed is
4
determined by two actors. One is the cutofffrequency
of the feeding waveguide. The other is the curvature
THESURPRISE
of the wavefrontwhere the cone is terminated. Unless
While we were quite confident that groovesinside the distance marked “ d in Figure 3 exceeds half a
the cone would improve performance, we expected the wavelength, the radiation pattern will approach that
improvement to be significant only over a rather nar- of an equiphase aperture, with rather hlgh sidelobes.
rowfrequency
range. After all,
corrugations
can pro- In other words, the bandwidthlimits turned out tobe
vide a large surface reactance only in the vicinity of largely independent of the corrugated conical surface
the quarter-wave resonance. However, the tests of the itself.
first “aluminum board told a different story. The
corrugations proved to be quite effective over at The inherent advantages of the Scalar Feed are
least a 1.5 to 1 frequency band! best
utilized in conjunctionwith reflectors or lenses
having F/D ratios in the range 0.5 to 1.0. When the
Howcould that be? It tooksometime to find the F/D ratios becomes much larger than unity, the horn
answer.When the answer was found, it all seemed so length needed for “ d in Figure 3 to exceed half a
obvious. Why did we not think of that up front? wavelength ets tobe a problem. Machining the corru-
After all, the answer given
is by the classical
d
gationsinsi e a longconewith
1s not an easy task.
a small opening angle
For this reason, the Scalar Feed
solution to the vector wave equation in spherical co- was not extensively used
Cassegrain
in antennas for
ordinates. It e l’citly states that radial fields sometime, but since then it has hadwide application.
must
decay as 1%’ or faster. In particular, that is
true for the radial E-field along a conicalsurface. As the F/D ratio decreases, the openingangle of
Furthermore, if that surface has a finite impedance, a Scalar Feed must be increased in order to provide
the ratio between the circumferential H-field and the for a reasonable aperture efficiency.
When that angle
radial E-field
is constant on the boundary. Boththose reaches 180 degrees (c.f. Figure 4, top), the corru-
fields, as well as the radial surface current, must gated cone turns into a flat corrugated surface. At
then decay as 1/R2. Experiments
were performed to this
point, the radiation attern close
is to ideal
provethistheory and it wasfully verified. for F/D ratios near 0.5. b i l e making the opening
angle larger than 180 degrees ispossible, and was in-
THE LIMITATIONS deed tried, the advantages of such configuration
over
an open waveguide feed turned out to berather insig-
During the nextseveralyears, a number of analy- nificant.
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 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Newsletter, December 1989

mentscould be metreasonably well. On the other hand,

they turned out be largely incompatible
with
a four-
horn monopulse configuration.
THE LESSONS LEARNED
Personally, I learned some important lessons from
my involvement in the development of the Scalar Feed.
First of all, by pursuing his idea through the initial
anddisappointing
phases, Alan Kay demonstrated that
the saying,"If at first you don't succeed, try
again"
has real merit. Secondly, the fact that cutting
grooves in the conicalsurfaceworked much better than
expected, and for an unforeseen reason.(atthe time),
illustrates that technical
progress is, at times,
based on sheer luck.
Third, the largely
failed attempts to extend the
utility of the Scalar Feed concept much beyond
its
initially demonstrated applications confirms another
basic p p l e : "No tree can grow tall enough to
reach
eaven." In other words, every
technical
concept
has its inherent limitations. Finally,
I learned that
the remuneration for making significant contributions
to the development of a new device
is rather time-
limited.
However, I still
wear that Scalar Feed tie
clip
almostevery day,
with considerable pride, more
Figure 4 Scaler Feeds with different opening angles. (Source: catalog than a quarter century later.
issued by TRG Division of Alpha Industries, Inc., 1974).
REFERENCES
The earliest documentsin my file labeled "The
Scalar F e e d bear that same title. Two are Product
Bulletins
issued by TRG Inc., dated Februa 20, 1963,
and February, 1964. The thirdis authored "by
Alan F.
At a relativelyearly
stage, efforts were made to- Kay: Scientific Report Number 5, Contract Number AF19
adapt the Scalar Feed for monopulse applications. (604) - 8057, prepared for Air Force Cambridge Re-
Since the corrugated horn acts to confine the radia- search Laboratories, March 30,1964. Then come:
tion in awell-definea angular region, the hope was to
obtain approximately equal widths for both sum and Viggh,
M.E.,
"Study
of
Design Procedures and Limita-
difference patterns. However, the aforementioned fre- tions for Monopulse Scalar
Feeds",
Final Report, Con-
quency limitations tend to make this rather impracti- tract No. F30602-68-C-0177 (RADC), August. 1969.
cal.
Green, K.A., and Gill, G.J., "Scalar Horn Fed
Lens
Thereare two conflicting requirements to be met Antennas", Twentieth USAF Antenna Symposium(Monti-
in this
context. First of all, the sum pattern of the cello, IL), October 1970.
excitingwaveguideclustermust be wideenough for the
fields to interact effectivelywith the corrugated An excellentsummary of recent developmentsisprovid-
conical
surface.
Second, the inner diameter theat ed in:
transition between that cluster and the cone must be
large enough to support the difference mode@). For a Clarricoats, P.J.B., and
Olver, A.D., Corrugated Horn
two-horn, E-plane monopulse feed, these two require- for Microwave Antennas, IEE Books, London, 1984.

SPECIAL OFTER TO CONTRIBUTORS

IDEAS FOR ANTENNA DESIGNER'S NOTEBOOK
are needed for futureissues of theNewsletter. Please send
your suggestions to HalSchrank (address above) and they
will be consideredfor publication as quickly as possible.
Topicscan'includeantennadesigntips,equations,
nomographs, or short-cuts as well as ideas to improve
or facilitate measurements. Propagation topics are also
welcome,infact we stronglyurge ourpropagation
members tohelp us balance the coverage in this column.
How would you like a COMPLETE SET OF THE ANTENNA
DESIGNER'S NOTEBOOK articles published since this column
began in the August 1983 issue? Send an idea for a future issue of
our Notebook to Hal Schrank and he will be happy to reward you
with a folder containing copies of all the items, including yours,
when it is published.
This column is a great opportunity for many of our AP-S
members who are too busy to publish a lengthy paper but who
would like to share some practical information that can help to
increase the productivity of antenna and propagationengineers.

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