Antenna Designer's Notebook-design curves for reducing the number of phase shifters in-phased arrays by subarraying

摘要

A major obstacle in the realization of large-aperture phased array antennas is the associated large number of phase shifters. The number of phase shifters can be reduced by assigning several radiating elements to one phase shifter. Each such group is called a subarray. As the subarray size increases, the FOV (field of view, or beam-steering range) generally decreases. A set of design curves that can be used to optimize the tradeoff between field of view and subarray area is presented.