EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION OF ADAPTIVE NULLING USING A MESH REFLECTORANTENNA

The authors report the first results experimentally demonstrating the ability of a reconfigurable mesh reflector to adaptively form a null i n the sidelobe region of an arbitrarily shaped pattern, with no a prio ri knowledge of the angular location of the source of interference. Us ing a prototype mesh reflector antenna with additional hardware and so ftware in a compact antenna test range (CATR), deep nulls have been su ccessfully formed for a number of simulated scenarios and some typical results are presented. It is shown that a null may be formed to a dep th of -60dB with respect to the pattern peak after less than 50 iterat ions of the nulling algorithm. It is believed that this represents the first demonstration of adaptive nulling using control of a reflector surface rather than the excitations of array or feed array elements.