Four-beams-reconfigurable circular-ring array antennas for monopulse radar applications

Abstract

We propose a new approach to the mask-constrained power synthesis of reconfigurable circular-ring array antennas for monopulse radar applications. By resorting to Orbital Angular Momentum vortex beams, and without increasing either the complexity of the beam forming network or the signal processing times with respect to the state-of-art solutions, the proposed method allows improving the precision pointing with respect to usual techniques. The overall synthesis is cast as a Convex Programming optimization problem aimed at reducing as much as possible the number of control points of the array, and it is tested in relevant application scenarios.