Design of planar arrays for obtaining efficient footprint patterns with an arbitrary boundary

An antenna pattern synthesis technique is presented which permits the design of planar antenna arrays with footprint patterns of a specified boundary. This technique is applicable to planar arrays of a wide variety of grid structures and can produce patterns with controlled ripple and sidelobe levels. The approach involves two steps: the first one, consists in stretching the pure real-continuous aperture (an extension of circular Taylor distributions, developed by Elliott [1]) into a distribution with a boundary that is inversely proportional to the beamwidth, in a set of specified ϕ-cuts, of the desired coverage region. The second one, is the minimization of a cost function (the square of the difference between the resulting power pattern and the desired one) using the Fletcher-Powell method. A square footprint, produced by a rectangular grid (obtained by sampling this distribution) with the corner elements appropriately removed, is presented.