Planar array design for low ambiguity

Antenna arrays used for radio direction finding must be designed to avoid spurious responses in the spatial spectrum, if gross errors are to be avoided. This paper is focused on the design of planar arrays which minimize ambiguity, so that the occurrence of false alarms, and hence gross errors, is significantly reduced. A cost function is proposed to drive an optimization algorithm based on the simulated annealing concept. The procedure is tailored for the array design problem to obtain best performance. An example solution for the design of an eight element array is generated, and contrasted with a commonly used regular array layout.