Nonuniqueness in inverse source and scattering problems

The fields radiated by spherically symmetric time-harmonic sources are used to illustrate how little can be learned about a source from knowledge of the radiated field outside of the source volume. It is shown that even if it is known that the source is spherically symmetric, it is not possible to determine its radial structure. Moreover, even if the radial structure of the source is known apart from a constant amplitude and a finite radius, it is not possible to evaluate those two unknowns independently. These examples are applied to demonstrate explicitly that two methods that have been claimed to produce exact unique solutions to inverse-source and inverse-scattering problems do not yield the claimed results.