A simple approach for the recovery of aperture distribution of phased array antennas with single RF channel

In this paper, a new simple method is proposed to recover the complex distribution (phase and amplitude) of a phased array antenna with single RF channel. The method depends on non-uniform spatial sampling (NUSS) of array elements. The elements are sequentially sampled but with overlapping “on” times so that two or more elements can be simultaneously on. Consequently, this type of sampling pass more power to the single RF channel in contrast with the uniform sampling which permits only one element to be on while the others are off. To validate the proposed method, it is compared to the time sequence phase weighting (TSPW) technique which uses phase shifters to recover the distribution on the aperture array. It is found that the NUSS system has less computational complexity and consequently it is more suitable for real-time realization. The simulation results also show that it has superior performance over TSPW technique in terms of the error in amplitude and phase of recovered signals.