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Trying to achieve the best surface accuracy control with the fewest actuators, this article mainly studies the distribution of actuators and the method of panel design. The influence of the number of faulty actuators on the accuracy of the surface shape is demonstrated. In addition, the method incorporating a triangular panel, node index and the fitting solution method of a single panel is also given. This method provides a reference for the design and realization of an active surface or a deformable sub-reflector for high performance large aperture radio telescopes.

The surface accuracy of a large parabolic antenna is an important indicator to evaluate the quality of the antenna. It not only directly affects the antenna’s aperture efficiency, thereby determining the shortest wavelength that the antenna can work, but also affects the main lobe width and side lobe structure of the antenna pattern. Microwave holography is an important method for parabolic antenna profile detection. In this article we adopt a new algorithm to adjust the panels for the large radio telescope with an active main reflector through the TM65 m antenna’s aperture phase profile. The panels of the TM65 m radio telescope is in a radial pattern with 14 rings. Each corner of the panel is fixed on the screw of the actuator to move up and down, and the adjacent corners of the four panels share an actuator. We use the method of plane fitting to calculate the adjustment value of every panel’s corner. But one actuator, which simultaneously controls the common corner of the adjacent panels, will have different adjustment values according to the different plane fitting equation based on adjacent panels. In this paper, the adjustment value of the adjacent panels’crosspoints are constrained to be equal to the constraint condition to calculate each actuator’s adjustment value of the TM65 m radio telescope. Through multiple adjustments and application of the new algorithms, the accuracy of the TM65 m antenna reflector profile has been improved from the original 0.28 mm to the current 0.19 mm.

This paper proposes an active sub-reflector suitable for large radio telescopes, which can compensate both of the deformation of the main reflector and sub-reflector position offsets. The mathematical formula of the main reflector deformation compensated by the sub-reflector is deduced based on Cassegrain and Gregory antenna structures. The position of the sub-reflector is adjustable to compensate for defocusing errors on high and low elevations, which are mainly caused by the deformation of the sub-reflector supporting legs. In this paper, the method of obtaining the optimum position of the sub-reflector from the aperture phase by the interferometric method is introduced. The actual measurement is verified on the Tianma 65m radio telescope, which provides a new way to diagnose the position error of the sub-reflector.

A subreflector adjustment system for the Tianma 65 m radio telescope, administered by Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, has been installed to compensate for gravitational deformation of the main reflector and the structure supporting the subreflector. The position and attitude of the subreflector are variable in order to improve the efficiency at different elevations. The subreflector model has the goal of improving the antenna's performance. A new fitting formulation which is different from the traditional formulation is proposed to reduce the fitting error in the Y direction. The only difference in the subreflector models of the 65m radio telescope is the bias of a constant term in the Z direction. We have investigated the effect of movements of the subreflector on the pointing of the antenna. The results of these performance measurements made by moving the antenna in elevation show that the subreflector model can effectively improve the efficiency of the 65 m radio telescope at each elevation. An antenna efficiency of about 60% at the Ku band is reached in the whole angular range of elevation.