HERAS is a tool developed in Matlab for the analysis of reflector antennas using physical optics (PO) theory. Its graphical user interface (GUI) and source code are freely available for educational and research purposes. It has the necessity of being a flexible tool to provide adaptability to system engineering requirements and can also be of interest to antenna engineers working on the design of reflector antennas. Due to the increasing demand of broadband services, satellite communications systems are becoming highly complex in order to meet connectivity requirements. To fully exploit the benefits of these systems, multidimensional optimisations are crucial, which call for an efficient estimation of the coverage characteristics. Reflector-based solutions are one of the preferred architectures for very high-throughput satellite (VHTS) systems. A detailed description of HERAS is presented in this paper which has been validated with available commercial software packages. In addition, some examples are described in which the tool has been used for the efficient estimation of VHTS systems performance.
Keywords: multi-beam antennas; object-oriented programming; physical optics; reflector antennas.