Complex conical beams for aperture field representations

A method is presented for computing aperture radiated fields by means of new conical beams with azimuth phase variation. These beams are generated in a natural way starting from the spectral-domain radiation integral, by expanding the electric field spectrum in the aperture plane in a Fourier series, and by approximating the obtained Fourier series coefficients by a sum of complex exponentials using the generalized pencil-of-function method. This transforms the radiation integral to a simpler form which can be evaluated analytically. Two types of wave objects are derived, both of them arising from the same spectral GPOF process, that possess different properties. Aperture fields obtained via the new approach are successfully compared to those calculated via direct near field integration or asymptotic evaluation.