On the statistics of analytic antenna patterns

The approximate log normal distribution of normalized power antenna patterns within the
\pm1
rad near-in region is presented for several families of illumination functions as an aid to system designers concerned with interacting radar type systems. The means agree well with experimental data on similar patterns, but the standard deviations are considerably greater. An empirical expression relating the first sidelobe level and antenna size to the 0.5 probability level has been extracted to aid system applications of the results. For
360\deg
coverage, a synthetic pattern is presented which gives a distribution close to the measured data.