Reducing the number of elements of linear antenna arrays using Fourier's coefficients equating method

An analytic method is proposed to reduce the number of elements of a Uniformly Spaced Antenna Arrays (USAAs). To this end, both excitations and positions of a Nonuniformly Spaced Antenna Array (NSAA) are obtained by equating the Fourier's coefficients of array factors of NSAA to those of predesigned USAA, in two steps. At first step, the array is considered USAA and excitations of elements are determined. At the second step, the position of elements are determined for the excitations obtained in the first step. These two steps are repeated several times to increase the accuracy. In fact, this method is the extension of Fourier's Coefficients Equating (FCE) method previously introduced to design NSAAs. The effectiveness of the presented method for both pencil beam and shaped beam patterns is verified by some comprehensive examples.