Synthesizing Wideband Frequency-Invariant Shaped Patterns by Linear Phase Response-Based Iterative Spatiotemporal Fourier Transform

A new approach for synthesizing wideband frequency-invariant (FI)-shaped patterns is presented. This method is a significant extension of the original iterative spatiotemporal Fourier transform (STFT) method that only deals with wideband FI pencil-beam patterns. Based on the original method, the wideband pattern can be regarded as a spatiotemporal spectral distribution, and the relationship between the spatiotemporal spectral distribution and finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter coefficients can be built as an STFT, which can be efficiently calculated by using 2-D fast Fourier transform (2-D-FFT). To achieve desired FI-shaped pattern performance, the spatiotemporal spectral distribution is iteratively adjusted by two new techniques called wideband pattern shaping and linear phase response (LPR)-based modification. Different from the constant phase response (CPR) processing in the original iterative STFT method, the LPR-based modification uses more relaxed phase requirements, thus releasing much more degrees of freedom. Numerical results show that the proposed method is effective even for very complicated pattern requirements, and it is very efficient in terms of both computation and storage. Besides, the proposed method can take into account the effects of frequency-variant antenna element patterns and mutual coupling in the periodic array structure.