Research on grating lobe reduction in limited-scan phased array antenna

The grating lobe reduction methods for non-equidistant array antennas in X-Band are proposed in this paper. The following methods are investigated: an active element pattern control, irregular arrangement of subarrays. A horn antenna element is designed to obtain a perfect active element pattern of an array, and a ring-grid aperiodic array composed of trapezoid subarrays with 1664 elements that are irregular arranged is designed. It is worth mentioning that the combination of these two methods can suppress the grating lobes dramatically in limited-scan phased array. In addition, it is more grating lobes reduction using the combination of these two methods compared with other methods for suppressing grating lobes.