An hybrid strategy for stepped amplitude arrays synthesis

The need to reduce as much as possible the number of active control points in modern radar antennas claims for the development of innovative synthesis strategies able to cluster the radiating elements or to reduce, since the beginning, the number of active elements. Due to the very large angular range to scan, in the case of radar applications the adoption of density tapering based techniques does not allow to fulfill the design constraints. In this paper, an effective hybrid approach for synthesizing stepped amplitude phased radar arrays is proposed and applied to cases of practical interest. The proposed strategy takes into account the mathematical nature of the synthesis problem at hand, which allows introducing an hybrid optimization strategy combining a smart use of global optimization based techniques and Convex Programming algorithms. Numerical example fully confirm usefulness and accuracy of the proposed tools.