Active Phased Antenna Arrays Calibration Method Including Edge Effects and Mutual Coupling

A new calibration method of active phased array antennas is presented in this paper. This method can be applied to the antenna arrays of various sizes and various radiating element numbers. It takes into account the edge effects and the coupling between the radiating elements. This method allows avoiding the degradations of the antenna radiation pattern caused by mismatch produced during a scanning and/or a weighting process. HFSS software is used to provide near-field electromagnetic numerical simulations. Matlab is used for far-field calculation from the near-field data; and also for the calculation of the illumination on the antenna surface by back-propagation of far-field data. The calibration process is performed by an optimization process by means of ADS software. An equivalent schematic is built in it in order to obtain desired radiation pattern which corresponds to the illumination on the antenna surface. This method is applied to a concrete case in order to demonstrate its efficiency.