On the Application of Radon Transformation for the Synthesis of Thinned Planar Antenna Arrays

This paper presents a deterministic algorithm for synthesizing Planar Sparse Antenna Arrays (PSAAs) through the utilization of the Radon Transform. The Radon transform is an integral transform which allows a 2D planar array to be reduced to an equivalent linear array along a specific azimuthal (ϕ) angle and is shown as a generalization of the Theory of Collapsed Distribution (TCD). Through the utilization of the Radon transform, a synthesis algorithm is presented which allows to explicitly control the array pattern along the inter-cardinal planes and it also allows a complete control on the degree of sparsity. The proposed algorithm showcases a computationally efficient method (computational complexity of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O(k)</i>) for the synthesis of PSAAs which showcase a wide scan volume (~±60°) while exhibiting minimal variation of the 14 Peak SideLobe Level (PSLL) (~0.13dB), Average SideLobe Level (ASLL) (~3.65dB) and Directivity (D<sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub>) (~3.55dB). The synthesized arrays are therefore suitable for applications requiring wide scanning phased arrays.