Grating lobe suppression in phased arrays composed of identical or similar subarrays

Abstract

The grating lobe suppression methods for non-equidistant array antennas composed of identical or similar subarrays are proposed. Subarrays have equidistant rectangular or triangular grid. The grating lobes of an antenna array are reduced due to the irregular arrangement of subarrays. The following methods are considered: relative shift of neighbor subarrays, arranging gaps between subarrays, using different element spacing in different subarrays, rotation of subarrays, and combination of these methods. The methods provide suppression of the grating lobes from −2.6 dB to −11 dB as compared to equidistant arrays while side lobes envelop grows slightly.