Scan Performance Prediction in Active Phased Array Antennas

Abstract

This paper proposes a technique to predict a priori the blind scan zones that could arise out of the geometric nature of the chosen antenna array grid empirically using an approximate expression of directivity. This expression accounts for the effect of the mutual coupling, complex excitations and the number of elements. The expression ignores the finite edge effect and only considers regular periodic array grids. This work showcases that the sparse antenna arrays outperforms the conventional antenna arrays and exhibit small variation in directivity over a wider scan volume in comparison.