Beamforming for Low-elevation-angle Detection by Radar Based on Dual-phase Shifters

The generation of low-elevation-angle radar detection patterns has always been a technical difficulty in forming and generating phased-array radar patterns. Aiming at the problem of beamforming for low-elevation-angle detection by radar, a convex optimization algorithm for dual-phase shifter (DPS) is proposed in the paper, so as to synthesize the ideal pattern of a phased array with DPS structure. In a DPS structure, two phase shifters are combined into one weight. Compared with a traditional phased array, the modulus of weight vectors is not necessarily a fixed constant in the DPS structure but is changeable within a continuous interval. To this end, an algorithm that converts the beamforming problem into a problem of DPS convex optimization is proposed, and the use of two beamforming approaches for achieving the weight vectors is studied. For both approaches, suboptimal solutions can be obtained in the paper. The simulation experiment results verfiy the effectiveness of two DPS algorithms.