Rules of thumb in designing an array beam pattern in the presence of random shading and phasing errors

Abstract

Random errors that include shading, phase, and element failures affect the beam pattern of an array, especially the side‐lobe level, shape and width of main beam, beam gain, and beam pointing direction. The sources of these random errors may originate in the construction of the array, beamforming operations, and wavefront distortions or in a combination of these factors. We have developed rules of thumb to estimate average side‐lobe level, peak side‐lobe level, and an error in main beam pointing direction of an array which is subject to random shading, phasing errors, and element failures. We also compared the estimated values calculated by rules of thumb with observed simulated results and found they agree well within 2–3 dB.