A. O. Manichev - Ph.D. (Eng.), JSC «GSKB Almaz-Antey named after A.A. Raspletin», NTC "Altair", Moscow. E-mail: alex_manichev@inbox.ru
A. A. Smirnov - JSC «GSKB Almaz-Antey named after A.A. Raspletin», NTC "Altair", Moscow. E-mail: yaraathed@gmail.ru
M. S. Marugin - JSC «GSKB Almaz-Antey named after A.A. Raspletin», NTC "Altair", Moscow. E-mail: MaruginM@gmail.com

Phased array antennas (PAAs) play important role in modern radiolocation systems. But design of these devices is a rather complicated task because of the necessity to perform a lot of calculations in order to optimize their parameters. Therefore development tools for PAAs designers are of great practical interest. Selection of the operating system (OS), under which the software should be run, is an important issue, because every OS (for example, Windows or Linux) has its own advantages for a PAA designer. Therefore it is desirable to create an application running under either of the popular OSs, i.e. develop a cross-platform application. A number of ways of cross-platform implementation is considered in the paper. On the basis of this analysis Qt was selected for realization of the PAA development tools, since it has a user-friendly and powerful development environment and a detailed help with a lot of examples. The application addressed several problems typical for the design of a PAA: specification and representation of the element grid, calculation of the radiation pattern of either a PAA element, or the whole PAA, synthesis of the amplitude distribution providing the difference pattern with a prescribed sidelobe level. The structure of the application contains three functional blocks: the input parameters block, the calculation block, and the display block. Interaction between the blocks is realized through the use of the central block - the core of the software. The modules of the input block are responsible for input of all the parameters and initial data needed for the problems solved in the application. The user interface must be user-friendly and mistake-proof. The Qt library has an exhaustive number of means for solution of this problem at any platform without changing program code, including manual input and work with files. The calculation block is involved in calculation of the PAA and PAA's element patterns, and synthesis of the amplitude distribution. The object-oriented properties of the programming language used in Qt (C++) were actively used in the realization of this block. The synthesis of the amplitude distribution was based on the Bayliss`es method. Data presentation is an important feature of a CAD system. It has to be quite informative and interactive. The paper considers possibilities of Qt in development of the application's GUI. The presented example of development of a cross-platform software for modeling the PAA radiation characteristics has shown, that in the case of a proper choice of the development kit the cross-platform CAD system can be successfully realized practically without any loss of functionality.