Pencil Beam Constrained Synthesis of Linear Sparse Arrays in Presence of Coupling Effects

In this work an efficient method is presented for the pencil beam constrained synthesis of linear sparse arrays. As a first step, the positions of a number of isotropic radiators are found on an aperture of given length. Then, the isotropic radiators are replaced with real antenna elements, and the excitations are optimized in such a way that, taking the mutual coupling into account, the radiation pattern belong to a prescribed mask. Two numerical examples show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.