Array Antenna Beamforming Study

In this paper, a synthesis method is studied to produce the shaped beam patterns. This method is based on the fact that synthesis of antenna patterns is equivalent to minimizing a certain function.Shaped pattern synthesis originated with Schelkunoff in 1943. However, the current magnitude variations could not be effectively controlled by most conventional approaches until Michael. J. Buckley in 1993 employed the implicitly constrained current elements in the optimization process. In his pioneering work, pattern synthesis is viewed as the minimization of an objective function and only that portion of the solution space which yields physically realizable solutions is searched.This paper has successfully adopted the above method to synthesize an equally-spaced linear array, and then has extended its application into the synthesis of shaped beam patterns from planar arrays. To simplify the question, each element can be viewed as omnidirectional during the synthesis. Finally the horn is chosen as the array element to revise that synthesis result. The simulation results both from the equally-spaced linear array and from the square array prove that the above method is flexible and effective.