Main lobe shaping in wide-band arrays

This paper describes a method to obtain a wide-band beam pattern whose main lobe has a desired shape, and, at the same time, an acceptable side lobes level. The aim of our work is to reproduce a main lobe profile as close as possible to a desired one by means of a synthesis of the array weighting window. To achieve this goal, an optimization process based on the simulated annealing is developed. Although the quality of the resulting beam pattern is slightly poorer than the one obtained in narrow-band conditions, the proposed method allows one to well attain the desired shape of the main lobe, also in case of flattop shaped beam.