Conformal four-beam antenna arrays with reduced sidelobes

Investigations on sidelobe reduction in multibeam conformal antenna arrays are presented. The recently presented concept of sidelobe reduction in planar multibeam antenna arrays in conjunction with the phase compensation technique has been applied for the design of reduced sidelobe multibeam conformal antenna arrays. Six- and eight-element antenna arrays fed by modified Butler matrices have been investigated and minimum radii have been found for which the sidelobe level is comparable to the respective planar multibeam arrays. A novel fully integrated six-element four-beam antenna array has been successfully designed in which sidelobes equal -14 dB for all four beams have been achieved.