Sidelobe control in cylindrical arrays

Low sidelobe patterns in cylindrical arrays are synthesized through the use of an artificially created noise source environment. Pattern/excitation pairs are generated by an exact formal process which optimizes the array performance. For symmetric patterns this process minimizes the signal-to-noise power ratio. For optimum antisymmetric patterns the on-axis boresight error is minimized. Sidelobe levels and rate of decay are controlled by proper selection of the angular variation of the noise amplitude.