Conical Frustum Multi-Beam Phased Arrays for Air Traffic Control Radars

The design of conical frustum phased array antennas for air traffic control (ATC) radar systems is addressed. The array architecture, which is controlled by a fully digital beam-forming (DBF) network, is composed by a set of equal vertical modules. Each module consists of a linear sparse array that generates on receive multiple instantaneous beams pointing along different directions in elevation. To reach the best trade-off between the antenna complexity (i.e., minimum number of array elements and/or radio frequency components) and radiation performance (i.e., matching a set of reference patterns), the synthesis problem is formulated in the Compressive Sampling (CS) framework. Then, the positions of the array elements and the complex excitations for generating each single beam are jointly determined through a customized version of the Bayesian CS (BCS) tool. Representative numerical results, concerned with ideal as well as real antenna models, are reported both to validate the proposed design strategy and to assess the effectiveness of the synthesized modular sparse array architecture also in comparison with conventional arrays with uniformly-spaced elements.

Automated summary

This paper addresses the design of conical frustum phased array antennas for air traffic control radar systems. The array architecture, controlled by a fully digital beam-forming network, consists of a set of equal vertical modules that generate multiple instantaneous beams pointing along different directions. The synthesis problem is formulated in the Compressive Sampling framework, and the positions of the array elements and complex excitations for each beam are determined using a customized version of the Bayesian Compressive Sampling tool. Representative numerical results validate the design strategy and demonstrate the effectiveness of the synthesized modular sparse array architecture compared to conventional arrays with uniformly-spaced elements.