Improved near field focusing of antenna arrays with novel weighting coefficients

Abstract

Antenna arrays show increased side lobes at increasing beam steering angles in the near field. Conventional techniques such as inhomogenous but symmetric amplitude illuminations, to assure a certain side lobe suppression level, do not reduce the side lobes sufficiently for the near field case. In this paper, a new additional asymmetric amplitude weighting function in combination with Dolph Chebyshev is proposed which can further improve the side lobe suppression almost over the whole side lobe range, to approximately -35 dB at φ = 0° and φ = 180° for the steering angle of 15° and 30°.