A Thinned-Sunflower Array Antenna Design With Spatial Density Tapering

An unequally spaced array designed by deterministic method is proposed, which adopts the method of spatial density cone cutting and probability density weighting on the basis of sunflower array, which can reduce the number of array elements while achieving the effects of equal amplitude feeding, low side lobe and suppression of grating lobes. The simulation results show that when the antenna array is at an elevation angle of 56° and an azimuth angle of 45°, the side lobe is -23.98 dB, and the grating lobe is -28.75 dB, which is about 6.38 dB and 8.39 dB lower than that of the sunflower full array.