Average radiation pattern digital antenna array and a method for reducing the average level of side lobes.
n the development of the existing statistical theory of antennas, new analytical relations are obtained for estimating the average radiation pattern of a digital antenna array. These ratios take into account the variance of rounding errors of the weight coefficients, errors in the amplitude and phase calibration of the antenna, jitter noise and rounding errors of the signal at the output of the analog-to-digital converter. It is shown that most of the factors affect the average level of the side lobes, as in analog antenna arrays. However, the variances of the phase calibration errors and the jitter noise determine the contribution of the new term, which has symmetry in the angular coordinate and has an extremums in the direction of the main beam of the antenna array and in the direction that is mirrored relative to the main beam. It is established that the variances of rounding errors depend on the signal-to-noise ratio and, when performing numerical studies, should be estimated based on the results of experimental studies. It is shown that digital processing in a sliding window reduces the average level of the side lobes by separating the spectral components of the signal and noise.