Array Design
The four planar phased array configurations that can be handled by APAS are shown below. The elements may be grouped across the array aperture using a rectangular or a triangular element grid.
Phased Array Configurations that can be handled by APAS
Starting a new array design is quite simple and involves the invoking of only three input dialog boxes namely, Input Apertue Data, for entering aperture data, TRM/TDU for inputting all T/R module data and optional TDU data. The third input dialog for specifying a new array design is the taper input dialog box Tapers. With this input dialog box specification data for up to four different tapers can be inputted: two sum tapers one for transmit and the other for receive and two difference tapers both on receive. This is all what is required to specify a new array design.
After the array design data has been inputted by the user to APAS, the 2-D far-field calculation of this design can be started by invoking the input Operation dialog box. All these four input data operations can be performed with a minute.
With a state-of-the art PC equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900x processor @ 3.8 GHz and 32 GB RAM a 2-D far-field calculation using a 513 x 53 resolution requires only 0.04 seconds computational time. This is including the time for calculating the antenna directivity, the exact beam pointing position, the 3 dB beamwidth in both main planes as well as the peak and average sidelobe level and main beam efficiency.