A self-similar fractal radiation pattern synthesis technique for reconfigurable multiband arrays

A novel method for designing reconfigurable multiband linear and planar antenna arrays is presented. The technique is based on a generalized Fourier series synthesis approach that exploits the self-similarity of a specified fractal radiation pattern in order to achieve the desired multiband performance. The fractal radiation patterns are composed of scaled and shifted copies of an appropriately chosen generating window function that exhibits low sidelobe levels and rapid spectral rolloffs in the transform domain. A newly developed thinning algorithm is presented which may be employed to reduce considerably both the overall physical size and the total number of elements in a synthesized multiband array. Finally, a band-switching scheme is introduced that is well-suited for implementation in the form of a reconfigurable common aperture array.