When working with antenna arrays and beam steering, the beam can only be steered to a certain amount away from the broadside direction before the gain begins to drop and grating lobes start to appear. Optenni Lab implements the total scan pattern calculation, which reveals the maximum gain of the antenna array to any direction, under certain assumptions about the beamforming algorithm.
Total scan pattern analysis is part of the Optenni Lab Array module.
Optenni Lab can calculate the total scan pattern in a number of scenarios:
- Applying a progressive phase shift between the array elements in one or two dimensions
- Trying to direct the beams to all possible directions over the sphere by calculating phase shifts from plane waves
- Applying amplitude tapering to the above cases
- Using a limited number of beams in the above cases
- Calculating the maximum possible gain to each direction
- Calculating the total scan pattern over a collection of user-specified excitations
- Showing the histogram of the values of the total scan pattern computation
Below you can see and example of the total scan pattern result and the associated histogram of the values (cumulative density function).
Optenni Lab can also combine the total scan patterns from multiple arrays to determine if they together can provide a more uniform angular coverage of the beams.
The images below show the total scan pattern of two arrays and their combined total scan pattern.
