Synthesis of footprint patterns

Summary form only given, as follows. Planar arrays are potentially useful in space-vehicle applications when the requirement is to provide uniform radiation over a portion of the Earth´s surface. Conceptually, proper array excitation will permit control of the ripple in the shaped region of the pattern and control of the sidelobe level in the unshaped region. An extension of Taylor´s circular aperture synthesis procedure provides a means for achieving this type of control. The requisite continuous aperture distributions are phi -symmetric and complex. Discretization is then practical for circular grid arrays. However, at the expense of a modest increase in aperture size, a pure real distribution can be found that will achieve the same pattern. In that case, discretization becomes practical for a rectangular grid array. In both cases, a one-dimensional linear stretch yields an elliptical boundary and a flat-topped beam of elliptical contour with controlled ripple, surrounded by sidelobes of controlled heights, also possessing elliptical contours.<>