Sidelobe reduction through element phase control in subarrayed array antennas

When dealing with the synthesis subarrayed array antennas, the phase control necessary for beam-steering purposes can be also exploited to reduce the undesired secondary lobes caused by the periodic spatial distribution of the amplitude excitations on the aperture when contiguous and identical subarrays are used. In order to determine the phase values of the array elements for a fixed subarray amplitude weighting, the iterative projection method (IPM) is adopted. Some representative results are shown to assess the effectiveness of the method.