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IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation
Volume 47 Number 3, March 1999

Table of Contents for this issue

Complete paper in PDF format

Beamformer Architectures for Active Phased-Array Radar Antennas

Ashok K. Agrawal, Senior Member, IEEE, and Eric L. Holzman, Senior Member, IEEE

Page 432.

Abstract:

In active phased-array antennas, the transmit and receive functions are distributed at the antenna aperture using transmit and receive (T/R) modules. The use of T/R modules provides a significant improvement in antenna performance and flexibility in the choice of array architectures. In this paper, we present a review of various beamformer architectures for active phased-array antennas. This review is limited to corporate-fed active phased-array antennas for radar applications, as the general discussion to include all phased-array types is too broad for any one presentation. Beamformer architectures for narrow and wide bandwidth arrays, including the choice of applying an amplitude taper in the T/R module or beamformer network are discussed. Beamformer architectures that increase antenna reliability are also presented.

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