On the Impact of Mutual Coupling Effects on the PSL Performances of ADS Thinned Arrays

In this paper, the performances of thinned arrays based on Almost Difference Sets are analyzed in the presence of mutual coupling effects. The geometry under test is composed by thin dipole elements and the arising mutual interactions are modeled by means of the induced EMF method. To assess the robustness of the ADS-based thinning technique also in such a non-ideal case, an extensive numerical analysis is carried out by considering several test cases characterized by different aperture sizes, lattice spacings, and thinning factors. The obtained results show that the peak sidelobe estimators deduced in the ideal case still keep their validity although, as expected, a deterioration usually arises due to the mutual coupling.