A solid state transmitter with adaptive beamforming

The development of solid state power amplifiers has created the opportunity for producing flexible phased array transmitters for use in radars, to complement the rapid advances in phased array receivers. The use of identical amplifiers throughout the array is required in order to achieve economies of scale; on the other hand, aperture distributions tapered in both amplitude and phase are required to give low side-lobe levels. This paper describes a solution to this problem using only phase shifters to control both tapers. An experimental array has been built, and both the construction and measured results are presented here.