ADS interleaved arrays with reconfigurable polarization

Polarization-reconfigurable arrays play a fundamental role in radar systems in order to enhance their detection probability and cancel clutters, chaffs, and jammers. In order to reach polarization flexibility, the integration of actively controlled elements in standard array configurations is often employed, but the overall system complexity and costs significantly increase. To overcome such limitations, the use of two shared aperture arrays with independent polarizations was proposed in by exploiting an interleaving scheme based on Difference-Sets (DSs). By combining the field generated by each sub-array, arbitrary polarizations, low sidelobes, large steering angles, and narrow beamwidths can be reached with a limited complexity of the underlying feeding network. Despite its theoretical and practical advantages, only few planar array geometries can be synthesized because of the limited number of available DS sequences.