Design considerations for low sidelobe levels for rectangular microstrip array antennas

The impetus for this research is the hypothesis that certain techniques, using simple mathematical procedures, as well as rigorous techniques can be used to determine and analyze the effect of partial nonuniform spacing on sidelobe performance of the rectangular microstrip array antenna. An extensive literature survey, conducted in order to shed some light on this particular subject, has yielded a sparsity of work addressing this issue, indicating a need for further research. This paper describes a study of the relative performance of the far field radiation pattern using different methods from the view point of reducing the sidelobe levels. Also, the implementation of the fractional change for nonuniform spacing to reduce the sidelobe levels is introduced. Detailed formulation and the computational procedures are presented and compared. Moreover, it is confirmed that, the field pattern can be calculated by the principle of pattern multiplication (PM) as well as by full wave analysis.