Low sidelobe design considerations of large linear array antennas with contiguous subarrays

Design of large array antennas with contiguous subarrays and having very low sidelobe levels of the order of - 40 dB is discussed. The effects of the amplitude quantization, phase quantization and the number of subarrays on the radiation patterns of contiguous arrays are studied, and results are presented for both sum and difference patterns. A linear array of length
200 \lambda
with different number of contiguous subarrays and having true time delay steering at the subarray level and phase steering at the element level is analyzed. It is shown that peak sidelobe/quantization lobe levels better than - 39 dB for the sum patterns and better than - 35 dB for the difference patterns can be realized within
\pm 60\deg
scan and 0.3 percent bandwidth.