Spherical Arrays - Design Considerations

In this paper we present design trade-offs of array architectures for hemispherical coverage. We show that a spherical array geometry is the optimal choice for this application in terms of performance and cost. It is a natural array geometry that provides scan-independent hemispherical coverage with a uniform gain pattern. We also show that a spherical array requires fewer elements than a comparable multi-planar phased array with significantly larger instantaneous bandwidths, lower polarization and mismatch losses