A contoured beam synthesis technique for planar antenna arrays with quadrantal and centro-symmetry

A method is described for the synthesis of planar array antennas with prescribed contoured beams. The technique utilizes a transformation which divides the problem into two decoupled subproblems. One subproblem involves the determination of certain coefficients of the contour transformation in order to achieve the required footprint contours. The number of coefficients which need to be used depends on the complexity of the desired contour, but is very small in comparison to the number of planar array elements. The other subproblem consists of a linear array shaped beam synthesis, for which there already exist powerful methods for determining appropriate element excitations. The size required for this prototype linear array depends on the number of contour transformation coefficients used and the size of the final planar array. Simple formulas then determine the final planar array excitations from the information forthcoming from the above two subproblem solutions