Optimisation of planar aerial arrays for lowest sidelobe level

The paper presents a new method of designing a planar array of discrete elements with respect to the array response in its own plane. Once the beamwidth is specified (using two parameters), the method seeks the set of amplitudes and phases which minimises the sidelobe level. The array elements can have any position, and can have any directional responses of their own, either theoretical or experimental. The procedure is essentially a constrained-gradient search, and uses linear programming at each iteration. As an example, results for a circular array are presented for a range of parameters.