OPTIMAL SYNTHESIS OF PHASE-ONLY RECONFIGURABLE LINEAR SPARSE ARRAYS HAVING UNIFORM-AMPLITUDE EXCITATIONS

In a large number of applications, including communications from satellites, an optimal exploitation of the available power is of the outmost importance. As a consequence, isophoric array architectures, i.e., arrays using the same power in all the different entry points and achieving the amplifiersʹ maximum efficiency, are of great interest. At the same time, the easy reconfigurability of the power patterns results fundamental in order to get a full exploitation of the payload. In this paper, an innovative and deterministic approach is proposed for the optimal synthesis of linear phase-only reconfigurable isophoric sparse arrays able to commute their pattern amongst an arbitrary number of radiation modalities. The introduced perspective leads to an effective solution procedure for the fast design of antennas with high performance, and does not recur to computationally expensive global-optimization techniques. Numerical results concerning applications of actual interest and employing realistic element patterns are provided in support of the given theory.