Circular arrays

Abstract

The field of circular (or cylindrical) arrays has received far less attention than that devoted to linear and planar arrays. At first sight this seems surprising since one of their principal advantages is the ability to deflect beams electronically through 360° with little change of either beamwidth or sidelobe level. Circular arrays have been applied, to a limited extent, in both communication systems and navigational aids since the late 1930s. There has, however, been surprisingly little change in their scale of application since that date, though there are now signs of a significant increase of interest in such arrays for applications to DF (Direction Finding) and ESM (Electronic Support Measures) systems. The analysis and general understanding of the properties of circular arrays has progressed steadily for many years and the most significant developments were probably made by several groups of workers in the 1960s when the concept of phase mode excitation was developed. The lack of applications in the past is prob ably due to the fact that the basic problems of exciting circular arrays with the correct values of amplitude and phase are, in general, more complex than for linear arrays. Furthermore, electronic scanning of directional patterns for circular arrays may be difficult to implement and can require both the amplitude and phase of each element of the array to be changed.