Two-Way Pattern Synthesis for the Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR)

Airborne, atmospheric radars need to detect the presence of relatively weak weather echoes near the earth's surface. In order to accomplish this, both antenna sidelobes and range-time sidelobes must be suppressed considerably. This paper focuses on antenna sidelobe suppression by means of using a genetic algorithm to optimize both the thinning of the transmit aperture and the receive taper simultaneously in order to get desirable two-way sidelobe levels.