Low-Sidelobe Multibeam Synthesis for Overlapped Subarray with Non-Identical Element Excitations

A new overlapped subarray structure with non-identical element-level weights is proposed to reduce the sidelobe level of multi-beam patterns. Firstly, by introducing two types of weight matrices, the relationship between the element-level weights and the overlapped subarray beam pattern is analyzed, with the subarray-level weights kept constant. Subsequently, an optimization model for element-level weights is established, with the goal of minimizing the sidelobe level, and convex programming is utilized to solve this model. Through these steps, satisfactory element-level weights for multi-beam patterns can be obtained. Compared to existing uniform continuous subarrays and overlapped subarrays with identical element-level weights, the proposed subarray structure achieves a lower sidelobe level.