Phased Array Bandwidth Enhancement Using a Novel Sampling Scheme

Phased arrays are a form of steerable antenna whose architecture makes the system complex and generally expensive. Their versatility and performance motivates the development of alternative structures which allow us to obtain simplified designs as powerful as the original approach but significantly cheaper. In this paper, a novel technique which collects information only from one antenna during each radio frequency cycle but introduces a restriction in the working bandwidth has been proposed. By studying the effect of the sampling order and optimizing it using backtracking or a genetic algorithm, the bandwidth is increased up to almost four times the original value for small arrays, and up to 25% of the carrier frequency for large arrays using maximum delay sorting. Finally, effectiveness of nonperiodic sampling order, which converts interfering harmonics into distributed background noise, is also shown.