Estimation of excitation amplitude and phase using radiation pattern for array antennas

Abstract

In array antennas, sometimes the desired radiation pattern cannot be obtained due to coupling between element antennas, reflections from the surroundings, or amplitude and phase error of the power supply circuits or failures. In these cases, it is necessary to regenerate the desired radiation pattern by estimating the excitation amplitude and phase of the array antennas. Among methods of estimation of the excitation amplitude and phase, the rotation element field vector method of element antennas is used for the phased array antenna with variable phase shifters, and the planar near-field measurement method is used for the array antennas with no variable phase shifters. The former is limited to phased array antennas, and the latter requires a large-scale scanner for the measurement and results in increased measurement time with larger-scale array antennas. In this paper, we propose a method of estimation of excitation amplitude and phase using the radiation pattern of array element antennas and the measured radiation pattern of the array antennas. Two methods are proposed here; the first method of estimation is the least-squares method using the electrical field as the measured radiation pattern, and the second is the repeating calculation method using the electrical power as the measured radiation pattern. We describe here the principle and experimental results when the first method is used, and the principle and the effectiveness of selection of the initial value for the second method is confirmed by numerical results. © 2000 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 83(9): 102–110, 2000