A hybrid approach to the synthesis of subarrayed monopulse linear arrays

In this paper, a hybrid approach for the synthesis of the ldquooptimalrdquo compromise between sum and difference patterns for subarrayed monopulse antennas is presented. First, the subarray configuration is determined by exploiting the knowledge of the optimum difference mode coefficients to reduce the dimension of the searching space. In the second step, the subarray weights are computed by means of a convex programming procedure, which takes advantages from the convexity, for a fixed clustering, of the problem at hand. A set of representative results is reported to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques are also presented.