Alexey V. Litvinov¹, Sergey E. Mishchenko², Andrey S. Pomysov³, Vitaly V. Shatsky4

1-4 Federal State Unitary Enterprise «Rostov-on-Don Research Institute of Radio Communication»

Federal Research-and-Production Center (Rostov-on-Don, Russia)

In measuring systems, it is necessary to know the position of the phase center of the antennas. This is most important for radar systems with active phased antenna arrays. Failure of active elements or their disconnection causes change of position of phase center of antenna system. The available methods of determining the position of the phase center are quite labour-intensive and complex. There is no universal approach to finding the phase center of a multi-element active phased array antenna.

The article presents the theoretical justification of the method of calculating the coordinates of the phase center of the active phased antenna array in case of fluctuations in the phase distribution and disabling some items. The essence of the method is to find coordinates of maximum lobes of amplitude beam pattern of active phased antenna array. Directivity pattern is formed on observation grid with uneven angular pitch on surface of unit sphere. Then the problem of directional search of coordinates of phase center is solved by criterion of minimum standard deviation of phases for multiple points. The set corresponds to each beam. The genetic algorithm has been applied to search for the phase center.

An example of implementation of the proposed method for the flat active phased antenna array with arrangement of its elements in units of rectangular grid along each coordinate has been considered

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