Experimental verification of novel method to reduce quantization lobes for phased array radar

The authors previously proposed a novel method to reduce quantization lobes, which occur due to the use of digital phase shifters in phased array antennas. This paper describes how we confirmed the method´s validity through experiments. In the experiments, we applied the method to an imaging radar that has a phased array antenna with a one-bit digital phase shifter and so has a high average level of quantization lobes in the radiation pattern. In doing so, we found that a noise-like artefact, which appeared in the radar-image background due to the high average quantization-lobe level, was reduced respectively by 7.3 dB and 9.2 dB with integrating factors of two and four. These results were in good agreement with predicted results.