Comparative analysis of windowing techniques in minimizing side lobes in an antenna array

Heavy amount of research is being done to reduce side lobes in antennas radiation pattern. Many novel techniques have been adopted in this pursuit. One such technique playing pivotal role in reducing side lobes is windowing techniques. The main emphasis of this paper lies on evaluation and comparison of different windowing techniques efficiency in reducing side lobes of an end-fire array. The windowing techniques chosen for comparison are Bartlett window, Hamming window, Hanning window, Blackman Harris window. The number of elements in array are eight and sixteen respectively. Finally we compared the performance of every window in terms of side lobes level (SLL) and generated polar plots and radiation patterns for each window. Hence we found out that performance of Blackman Harris window is very good and it is a very good general purpose window, having good side lobe rejection and having a moderately wide main lobe.