Tapering of Multitransmit Digital Beamforming Arrays

Various taper functions are well known to suppress side lobes in antenna array factors. These tapers are limited to either transmit or receive arrays and are mostly restricted to arrays with a high number of elements. This paper presents an approach for applying taper functions also to digital beamforming (DBF) arrays with transmitter multiplexing. For such DBF configurations, taper functions have not been known yet. An example for a multiple transmit DBF taper will be given which is dedicated for low number of elements.