Phased Array Antenna Beam Pointing Accuracy Study

Along with the electronic warfare demand and the requirement of probing and tracking outer-space objects, phased array antennas have become developmental mainstream of the applied radar antennas. The key for phased array antennas with good functions is the use of controllable phase shifters. However, phase quantization errors affect the accuracy of phased array antenna beam pointing badly, which is mainly researched here. First, based on phased array antenna's mono-pulse goniometry and separate coordinate technology about phase control, the antenna beam pointing error formula, caused by phase quantization error, is derived from linear array and circular array to planar array and cylindrical array. Then, the capacities of round-off method, two probable value method (TPVM), shift and compensate phase feeding method (SCPFM) and shift compare and compensate phase feeding method (SCCPFM), are compared in improving the accuracy of beam pointing. TPVM is a kind of random phase feeding method, which imports noise and decreases the accuracy greatly. The effects of SCPFM and SCCPFM are better, especially the latter. Their maximum and variance of beam pointing accuracy are much smaller than the results of round-off method. Deficiently, only ordinary antennas are studied here, circular array and cylindrical array, for example. Farther study about complex and anomalous conformal antennas is expected.