Patent ID: 6339398
Filing Date: 2002-01-15
Classification: H01Q

Abstract:
A method for compensating for failed elements in an antenna array comprising the steps of:arranging a control unit, the control unit comprising a calculation means and the control unit via a control signal network controlling the amplitude and phase settings of each element of the array, positioning a phase reference point of the array antenna in a failed element; synthesizing by means of the calculation means a unity value for all angles and weighting the solution with a specific excitation excfailed of a failed element, by formulating a correction excitation optimization problem as &Sum;k=1K&it;exckcorr&CenterDot;&ee;-j&it;â€ƒ&CenterDot;k0&CenterDot;(xk&CenterDot;up+yk&CenterDot;vp)=1in which p=1, 2, . . . P and up, vp are different angles and ko is a constant; selecting K neighboring elements of the failed element and selecting the number of different angles P such that P=K to obtain a situation in which there exists only one solution to excn which denotes an excitation for an element n according to exc=[A]âˆ’1Â·{right arrow over (1)}â€ƒin which A=[â€ƒ&it;g1&af;(u1,v1)g2&af;(u1,v1)&ctdot;gK&af;(u1,v1)g1&af;(u2,v2)g2&af;(u2,v2)&ctdot;gK&af;(u2,v2)&vellip;&vellip;&ctdot;&vellip;g1&af;(up,vp)g2&af;(up,vp)&ctdot;gK&af;(up,vp)&it;â€ƒ]â€ƒgk(up,vp)=eâˆ’jÂ·k0Â·(xkÂ·up+ykÂ·vp) exc=[exc1cor,exc2corr, . . . , excKcorr]T, whereby said method results in a steering angle independent compensation as a total control vector consists of a sum of a constant compensation vector and an initial control vector.