Experimental demonstration of adaptive nulling using a mesh reflector antenna

The authors report the first results experimentally demonstrating the ability of a reconfigurable mesh reflector to adaptively form a null in the sidelobe region of an arbitrarily shaped pattern, with no a priori knowledge of the angular location of the source of interference. Using a prototype mesh reflector antenna with additional hardware and software in a compact antenna test range (CATR), deep nulls have been successfully formed for a number of simulated scenarios and some typical results are presented. It is shown that a null may be formed to a depth of -60 dB with respect to the pattern peak after less than 50 iterations of the nulling algorithm. It is believed that this represents the first demonstration of adaptive nulling using control of a reflector surface rather than the excitations of array or feed array elements