A fast DFT planar array synthesis tool for generating contoured beams

An efficient procedure, based on a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) expansion of planar array distributions, is described for synthesizing contoured beams in satellite antenna applications. The DFT provides a global basis set that spans over the entire array, and thus produces highly directional beam patterns to serve as corresponding local basis functions for representing the desired far zone radiation field of the array. The unknown coefficients of the DFT expansion are then found via a minimum least square error (MLSE) technique. While the total number of DFT coefficients exactly equals the number of array elements, it is found that only a small fraction of the total unknown DFT coefficients generally remain dominant, and only these need to be solved, thus making the present approach very fast.