AVERAGING OF COLLECTED-POWER FLUCTUATIONS BY A MULTIAPERTURE RECEIVERSYSTEM

When a large aperture is used to collect light propagated through the atmosphere, it performs an average operation on the irradiance fluctua tions, resulting in collected-power fluctuations that are not as large as those that could be obtained from a point receiver. We present an expression for the aperture-averaging factor of optical scintillation using multiaperture architectures on the receiver configuration. That expression is used to assess the decrease in the total collected power fluctuations for several multiaperture receiver configurations. (C) 1 996 Society of Photo-Optical instrumentation Engineers.