Grating Lobe Suppression in Linear Nested Phased Array with Large Element Spacing

Nested grid is employed in this paper to suppress the grating lobes in linear phased array with large element spacing. The multilevel nested array is based on a basic antenna element which is the fundamental unit to construct larger subarrays level by level. By the configuration of nested array, a quasi-random layout of subarray location is formed. Furthermore, the original large grid can be decomposed into many levels with smaller grid which only need less variables to determine the layout of total array. In this paper, a comparison between a three-level-nested array and a conventional one with subarray design is presented when the array is pointing at 15° and the result exhibits that the grating lobe level is decreasing by 2.2dB in nested array which demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of grating lobe suppression by nested array design.