A Phase Compensation Technique for the Tradeoff Design of Irregular Phased Array

A tradeoff design of irregular arrays is proposed to achieve significant radiation performance within a wide scanning range. Through different phase compensation for the elements in a subarray, the radiation vector of each element is deflected and a conical beam pattern can be formed. Thus, combining tradition irregular array and phase compensation technique, the directivity in the broadside is slightly sacrificed, while that in the wide scanning angles can be improved. Simulation results show that the directivity of irregular arrays after compensation is much larger than that without compensation by more than 2.5dB in the large scanning angles. As for a 16x16 tetromino-shaped irregular array with half-wavelength interelement, the scanning range can be further extended to ±70° after phase compensation. Moreover, the phase compensation is achieved by delay lines, which does not increase the complexity as compared to conventional structures.