Sidelobe minimization of uniformly-excited sparse linear arrays using exhaustive search and visual browsing

Visualizing antenna design spaces

“…This visualization tool contributed to the finding published in [14] that it was possible to achieve essentially the optimal performance of uniformly spaced arrays with fewer elements (thus less cost) spaced non-uniformly in certain configurations. The tool can of course be used to explore other kinds of design issues as long as the data basically conforms to the patterns shown here.…”

“…In our next round [14], we were given a particular optimization problem to focus on, which was as follows. Our goal was to maximize performance of sparse linear array antennas with uniform excitation, i.e., the assumption of linear spacing of the phased array elements in our previous round was relaxed but the constraint of uniform signal excitation across the array elements was fixed.…”

“…This paper will focus on a subset of the prototypes in a discussion of lessons learned as we sought to bring our expertise as visual interface researchers to the problem of antenna design. The individual systems have been described in brief in other publications, m o s t l y i n I E E E a n t e n n a e n g i n e e r i n g c o n f e r e n c e s [12][13] [14] [17]. Details regarding our contribution to antenna engineering may be found there.…”