SPHERICAL-SHELL AND VOLUME ARRAYS

By applying appropriate phase weights, an array of omnidirectional ele ments on a spherical shell can be made to scan the main beam over 4 pi steradians. Although the general analytic solution for the radiation pattern appears to be intractable, the result when the elements are un iformly weighted in amplitude is a sine function. This result is appli ed to derive the radiation pattern from a fully or partially filled sp herical array with uniform amplitude weighting throughout. The establi shed optimal aperture distributions used with linear arrays are adapte d to obtain volume distributions to apply to the elementary shells in a fully filled sphere to obtain the corresponding radiation pattern ch aracteristics.