Reducing grating lobes due to subarray amplitude tapering

Subarray amplitude tapering is a simple, lower cost method of generating low sidelobes in an antenna's far field pattern. Unfortunately, this simple technique also generates unwanted grating lobes. Placing the exact amplitude taper at the element outputs produces the desired far field pattern, but the architecture is complicated and expensive. An alternative to these two techniques is a design process that entails placing amplitude tapering at subarray outputs and element amplitude tapers that are identical between corresponding elements in groups of identical subarrays. In this way, the amplitude taper approximates the desired taper much better than subarray tapering alone, yet groups of subarrays are identical so that the design remains very simple.