Sidelobe suppression approach at subarray level for sum and difference beam without analog weighting

In phased array at subarray level with monopulse technology, generally, analog weighting at element level are adopted for sidelobe suppression of patterns, while digital weighting at subarray level for adaptive processing. This paper studies the sidelobe suppression method for sum and difference beam by using only subarray level weighting instead of analog weighting, which is most of interest for the reduction of hardware cost and complexity. A new approach is presented, which adopts genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize weights vector at subarray level for sum and difference beam, and the encoding scheme, constitution of fitness function, and realization of genetic optimization are also given. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can suppress sidelobe of patterns effectively, especially for sum beam.