IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

11, 2012

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A New Technique for Obtaining Wide-Angular Nulling in the Sum and Difference Patterns of Monopulse Antenna
Jafar Ramadhan Mohammed
AbstractA simple technique for obtaining wide-angular nulling in the sum and difference patterns of the monopulse antenna is presented. This technique involves the addition of two elements, one at each end of the monopulse antenna array, which together produce a cosine pattern used for obtaining wide-angular nulls. By adjusting the amplitude of the excitation of the two-element auxiliary array, it is possible to modify the overall array pattern to place wide angular nulls in the directions of undesired interference signals. Index Terms Monopulse antenna, sidelobe suppression.

I. INTRODUCTION MONOPULSE antenna has separate sum and difference patterns. The sum pattern has a peak, whereas the difference pattern has a null in the direction of the desired signal. The sum pattern peak detects the desired signal, and the difference pattern null accurately locates it. In tracking radar, one is confronted with interfering signals originating in a predened angular sector. In such a case, both patterns must have a wide-angular null in the direction of interfering signals to enhance the radars performance. Two independent excitations such as Taylor [1] and Bayliss [2] could be applied to the monopulse antenna in order to achieve good features in both patterns. However, adjusting the sum pattern to place a null in the direction of interference will not place a null in the difference pattern as well. Hence, either the sum and difference channels must be adapted separately, or a technique of simultaneously nulling in both channels can be used [3], [4]. However, these approaches require a feed network of considerable complexity. This complexity can be reduced by utilizing subarray conguration [5]. Recently, a signicant improvement in the framework of sumdifference pattern synthesis through subarray conguration has been achieved by using optimization techniques [6], [7]. The simplication of the feed network has also been investigated by sharing some excitations for the sum and difference channels [8], [9]. In [9], the convex optimization strategy has been used to synthesis optimal sum and difference patterns with arbitrary sidelobes. This method has been successively extended by the same authors in [10], where

the convex optimization has been used to synthesize linear arrays able to dynamically recongure their radiation pattern by modifying the excitation phases. However, this approach requires repeatedly redesigning the excitations according to problem requirements to get an arbitrary sidelobe. In this letter, a new simple technique for obtaining simultaneous wide-angular nulling in the sum and difference patterns is presented. This technique involves the addition of two elements, one at each end of the monopulse antenna array, which together produce a cosine pattern used for obtaining nulls over a wide angular range in the sum and difference patterns. Moreover, the proposed technique can be applied to the modern subarray conguration (e.g. [9]) to achieve optimum low sidelobes in both sum and difference patterns without redesigning the original excitation weights. II. PRINCIPLES OF THE TECHNIQUE A. Original Monopulse Antenna Consider the simple case of a one-dimensional linear array discrete radiating elements. For the sum pattern, of the elements have independent excitations that are chosen according to cosine taper, and then the radiation pattern due to such taper can be expressed as (1) where , and is the interelement spacing. The rst sidelobe level in this radiation pattern is at 23 dB, while the nulls in this pattern occur at (2) Hence, the full angular width of the main beam, from the null at to that at , is (3) For the difference pattern, the excitation weightings are chosen to produce sine taper, then the radiation pattern due to such taper can be expressed as (4)

Manuscript received August 27, 2012; revised October 01, 2012; accepted October 03, 2012. Date of publication October 18, 2012; date of current version November 15, 2012. The author is with the College of Electronic Engineering, University of Mosul, Mosul 41001, Iraq (e-mail: jafarram@yahoo.com). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2012.2224086

1536-1225/$31.00 2012 IEEE

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

First, let then becomes

and

. Equation (6)

(7) Next, we choose and resulting in

(8) It is now quite obvious that the desired goal can be achieved by properly setting the value of amplitude weighting , i.e., setting (9) results in a total eld in the difference channel

(10)
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the new technique for obtaining simultaneous nulling.

This radiation pattern has sidelobe level of nulls in this pattern occur at

18 dB, and the

This obviously has a wide angular null toward and around the interference direction (i.e., ). The angular width of the null was found to increase as the interference moves away from the main beam. In fact, in this respect it may be more informative to rewrite (10) in the form

(5) B. Sector Nulling in Both Sum and Difference Patterns The two-elements auxiliary antenna is added to the original monopulse array, one at each side, as shown in Fig. 1. For the difference channel, let the amplitude excitation of the two-element auxiliary antenna be , and let the phase of their excitation be . Let a subscript denote the element added at position , and let a subscript denote the element added at . In the far-eld region, the resultant pattern is position the addition of the radiation patterns of the two antennas, i.e., (11) Here, the rst factor in curly brackets gives the amplitude mismatching factor. Thus, the width of angular null extends over the range for which the amplitude mismatching factor remains small. Applying the same mathematical analysis to the sum channel, the total radiation eld can be represented as

(12) (6) We wish to set the values of and for each added element so as to achieve the objective of a wide angular null centered at a predened interference direction . The approach is to set the phase so that the lobes of the two-element pattern are matched in width to the sidelobes of the original monopulse antenna and then to set the amplitude to cancel the sidelobes of the original monopulse antenna in the desired angular region. We proceed as follows. In (12), we also choose . This means that there exists a xed position for the added elements to obtain simultaneous wide angular nulling in both sum and difference channels. By choosing , we can obtain exact coincidence between all nulls of two-elements pattern and sum pattern as shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 3 shows the radiation patterns of the two-element array and that for the difference array. The coincidence between nulls is evident. The goal is to choose the values of and shown in Fig. 1 to cancel interfering signals. This implies that the sidelobe level to interferences of the original

MOHAMMED: OBTAINING WIDE-ANGULAR NULLING IN SUM AND DIFFERENCE PATTERNS OF MONOPULSE ANTENNA

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Fig. 2. Sum pattern of original antenna and cosine pattern of two-element auxiliary antenna.

Fig. 5. Resulting pattern compared to original pattern for

Fig. 3. Difference pattern of original antenna and sine pattern of two-element auxiliary antenna.

Fig. 6. Resulting pattern compared to original pattern for

patterns of the overall array. The original monopulse antenna was considered as a one-dimensional array of el. The two added ements that are equally spaced by elements are spaced from the end elements of the monopulse antenna array. A. Independent Excitations In this section, the cosine and sine tapers are used for the sum and difference channels, respectively. In our rst example, we would like to design the sum and difference patterns to be insensitive to interfering signals that are assumed to enter through the rst sidelobes of both patterns. To cancel these interfering signals, we need to adjust the values of variable attenuators and . In this case, the value of was chosen here to be 0.0706, which is equal to the level of the rst sidelobe of the original sum pattern since we have cosine taper, then the resulting sum pattern is shown in Fig. 5. When the value of was chosen to be 0.122, which is equal to the level of the rst sidelobe of the difference pattern, the resulting difference pattern is shown in Fig. 6. In the next example, the value of was chosen equal to 0.016 to cancel the interfering signals that are assumed to enter through the third sidelobe, The resulting sum pattern is shown in Fig. 7. The third sidelobe of the resulting sum pattern is canceled, and all other sidelobes were reduced. For the difference pattern, a value of was chosen at 0.0316, and the resulting difference pattern is shown in Fig. 8. The third sidelobe is canceled here, and all other sidelobes were reduced.

Fig. 4. Congurations of the proposed technique.

monopulse antenna and of the auxiliary antenna must be identical. The overall pattern then has a response of zero at the direction of interfering signals. C. Feasibility of the Proposed Solution Fig. 4 shows two possible congurations of the proposed technique. The antenna elements are small dipoles. The effect of mutual coupling could be signicantly reduced by using the collinear arrangement compared to parallel arrangement. In this case, the separation distance and the length of dipoles should be carefully selected to avoid any contacts between added elements and the original one. III. SIMULATION RESULTS To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, we compute a number of examples and plot the sum and difference

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

Fig. 7. Resulting pattern compared to original pattern for

Fig. 10. Resulting pattern compared to original Morabito and Rocca [9] pattern . for

can be used effectively to reduce the sidelobes of both sum and difference patterns by the addition of a two-element antenna rather than redesigning the original optimal excitation weights. Such a result fully conrms the generality and exibility of the proposed technique. IV. CONCLUSION A simple technique for canceling the sidelobes into which the interfering signals are coming in the sum and difference patterns of a monopulse antenna is introduced. It has been shown that the proposed method is simpler than the method of synthesizing sum and difference patterns with low sidelobes by optimizing the weights of element excitation. It can be used to improve the pattern of existing antennas by the addition of an auxiliary antenna rather than redesigning the original antenna. The principle of the new technique may be extended to various types of antennas. REFERENCES
[1] T. T. Taylor, Design of circular apertures for narrow beamwidth and low sidelobes, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. AP-8, no. 1, pp. 1722, Jan. 1960. [2] T. A. Milligan, Bayliss line-source distribution, in Modern Antenna Design. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005, vol. 7, sec. IV, pp. 158161. [3] R. L. Haupt, Simultaneous nulling in the sum and difference patterns of a monopulse antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. AP-32, no. 5, pp. 486493, May 1984. [4] R. A. Monzingo, R. L. Haupt, and T. W. Miller, Introduction to Adaptive Arrays, 2 ed. Hertfordshire, U.K.: Scitech, 2011. [5] D. A. McNamara, Synthesis of sub-arrayed monopulse linear arrays through matching of independently optimum sum and difference excitations, Inst. Elect. Eng. Proc., vol. 135, no. 5, pp. 293296, 1988. [6] L. Manica, P. Rocca, A. Martini, and A. Massa, An innovative approach based on a tree-searching algorithm for the optimal matching of independently optimum sum and difference excitations, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 5866, Jan. 2008. [7] Y. Chen, S. Yang, and Z. Nie, The application of a modied differential evolution strategy to some array pattern synthesis problems, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 7, pp. 19191927, Jul. 2008. [8] M. Alvarez-Folgueiras, J. Rodriguez-Gonzales, and F. Ares-Pena, Synthesizing Taylor and Bayliss linear distributions with common aperture tail, Electron. Lett., vol. 45, no. 11, pp. 1819, 2009. [9] A. F. Morabito and P. Rocca, Optimal synthesis of sum and difference patterns with arbitrary sidelobes subject to common excitations constraints, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 9, pp. 623626, 2010. [10] A. F. Morabito, A. Massa, P. Rocca, and T. Isernia, An effective approach to the synthesis of phase-only recongurable linear arrays, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 60, no. 8, pp. 36223631, Aug. 2012.

Fig. 8. Resulting pattern compared to original pattern for

Fig. 9. Resulting pattern compared to original Morabito and Rocca [9] pattern . for

B. Partial Common Excitations In this section, the proposed technique is applied to the partial common excitations approach [9]. Here, the synthesis of optimal sum and difference patterns using partial common excitations approach (six elements among 10 are shared between the two patterns) has been considered as an original antenna. The other parameters that are used to obtain optimal sumdifference synthesis are the same as given in [9]. The resulting sum and difference patterns are shown in Figs. 9 and 10, respectively, together with the optimal patterns that are obtained by using the approach of [9]. Differently from [9], the proposed technique