A Multiresolution Approach to Contoured-Beam Antennas

In the design of contoured-beam antennas, several synthesis methods have been developed, but usually little importance has been given to the issue of finding an "efficient" representation of the antenna far field: this is the main scope of this paper. A wavelet expansion of the far field is developed and applied to the synthesis of array-fed reflector antennas for geographic coverage (e.g., Europe coverage). Two different synthesis techniques are considered as application examples of the devised pattern representation: a field-synthesis projection method and a power synthesis optimization based on a genetic algorithm specifically adapted for antenna design. As a byproduct, this paper also presents a way to construct a locally orthogonal beam basis that can be used without the present wavelet scheme