Consumption of degrees of freedom in adaptive nulling array antennas

A gradient search technique is used to maximize consumption of the degrees of freedom for N-channel adaptive nulling phased array antennas. The technique is based on a figure of merit which seeks to maximize the sum of the square roots of the interference covariance matrix eigenvalues. Equivalently, the worst case interference source configuration attempts to completely consume N degrees of freedom of the adaptive nulling antenna. Results are given for several basic regularly spaced arrays. The technique can be applied to a phased array with arbitrary array element positions.