Parametric Phase Spoiling for Large Airborne Phased Array Radars

Phase spoiling for desired pattern synthesis is a common method used in phased arrays and has been applied widely in Communication and Radar systems. Existing algorithms emphasize on obtaining desired pattern (typically a broadened beam), concentrate on improving radiation efficiency (or mean square error with respect to the the desired pattern) in the region of interest. However, in large airborne phased array radars it is important to achieve a good control on side lobe characteristics along with the antenna radiation efficiency. Metrics such as peak and average side lobe levels (SLL) determine the exo-clutter performance of phased array airborne radars. In this work, we propose a Parametric Phase Spoiling (PPS) algorithm, which gives good performance on multiple metrics such as Efficiency, Mean Square Error, Peak and Avg SLL etc simultaneously. We compare the performance of PPS with the existing algorithms for a wide range of beam broadening factors.