Synthesis of reconfigurable planar arrays for monopulse radars

An effective synthesis strategy for the optimal design of reconfigurable planar arrays generating sum and difference patterns for monopulse radar applications is presented in this work. The problem is formulated as a mask-constrained power pattern synthesis where arbitrary sidelobe bounds can be included and the two beams share a set of array excitations in order to reduce the complexity of the arising beam forming network. The synthesis of the excitation weights is addressed, for a fixed geometry, by means of a linear programming procedure enabling the design of large antenna structures. A set of results will be reported and discussed to show the effectiveness and the versatility of the proposed method.