Effects of antenna element bandwidth on adaptive array performance

The effects of individual antenna element bandwidth on the performance of adaptive arrays is studied when the incident interfering signals are wide-band signals. For these signal scenarios, as expected, the antenna element response over the bandwidth of the system plays an important role. If the individual antenna elements are dispersive, then the mutual coupling between array elements leads to dissimilar and dispersive channels in an adaptive array. This in turn leads to degradation in the performance of the adaptive array in that the adaptive array has to use more degrees of freedom to a strong wide-band interfering signal. It is shown that by using wide-band antenna elements, one can significantly improve the performance of an adaptive array.