A Position Error Representation Method for Planar Arrays

The position errors are inevitable and strongly influence the electrical performance of planar arrays. In previous studies, position errors have often been classified as systematic and random errors. There are many methods to represent the systematic and random errors separately, but few studies have dealt with both of them simultaneously. Here, we propose a conical method for the representation of position errors, which considers both the relevance and the randomness of the adjacent planar array elements. Uniform, normal, and conical representation methods are used as comparisons to generate the simulation data of position errors. Prediction models are built based on a linear programming support vector regression algorithm and on the antenna theories to evaluate the ability of different representation methods. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted on a platform with 8 × 8 array elements. The prediction results demonstrate the superiority of the conical representation method.