A hybrid approach for the optimal synthesis of pencil beams through array antennas

A hybrid approach to the synthesis of the excitations and locations of non-uniformly spaced arrays, in order to achieve optimal focusing in any given direction, is proposed and discussed. The approach takes definite advantage from the convexity of the problem with respect to the excitation variables, and exploits a simulated annealing procedure as far as the location variables are concerned. The corresponding synthesized patterns outperform previously known results in standard benchmark problems.