Side lobe reduction in uniformly excited linear arrays

Uniformly excited, equally-spaced linear arrays do not provide side lobe levels below - 13.3 dB, and thus are less desirable in applications requiring lower side lobe levels. We present an efficient method for side lobe reduction in these arrays with little penalty on the directivity. The method involves the following steps: construction of a periodic function containing only the side lobes of the uniformly excited array, calculation of the Fourier series of this periodic function, and subtracting the series from the array factor of the original uniformly excited array after it is truncated. It is shown that such newly formed arrays can provide side lobe levels about 10 dB below those of the corresponding uniformly excited arrays, at the cost of nearly 0.5 dB drop in directivity.