Raytheon Company

Matthew P Little

Landon L Rowland

David R Kralj

Jacquelyn A Vitaz

Douglas M McKay

The Active Electronically Scanned Lens Array design for a phased array reduces the cost of the phased array with minimal sacrifice to array performance. The design replaces transmit/receive (T/R) modules at the front end of the array with low cost and low lost phase shifters. A tradeoff in this design is a periodic phase quantization error that leads to quantization lobes. To reduce quantization lobes, a phase addition approach is presented to break up with the periodicity. In the presented approach, a phase offset is added at a T/R module and then corrected for at each radiating element in the array. The applied phase offset can be either deterministic or random.

Beamsteering technique to minimize sidelobes due to phase quantization in a phased array antenna

An antenna is provided from a plurality of antenna elements, each having a pair of orthogonally coupled notch elements coupled to an interleaved stripline-to-slot feed structure. Each dual-polarized, interleaved tapered slot antenna element forms a building block and a plurality of such tapered slot antenna elements can be arranged to form a phased array antenna having a triangular lattice pattern. The phased array antenna is capable of receiving electromagnetic signals having orthogonal polarization and includes a feed structure which provides interconnections on a single plane. The structure of the tapered slot antenna structure provides wideband, wide scan performance, for multiple polarizations without requiring electrical continuity between adjacent notch antenna elements.

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Harvard, MA, United States of America

Matthew P Little