Rectangular grid antennas are widely used in practice due to their advantages and versatility. This paper simplifies the design procedures of such antennas by optimizing their radiation characteristics using minimum number of the optimized elements while maintaining the same performance. The method consists of partitioning a fully square grid array into two unequally sub-planar arrays. The first one contains the inner and the most central elements of the initial planar array in which they are chosen to be non-adaptive elements, while the remaining outer and boundary elements which constitute L number of the square-rings are chosen to be adaptive elements. Then, the optimization process is carried out on those outer rings instead of fully planar array elements. Compared to a standard N×M planar array with fully adaptive elements, the number of optimized elements could be reduced from N×M to 2{2L(N-L)}, so as to significantly reduce the system cost without affecting the overall array performance. Results of applying the proposed method to optimize a small 9×9, medium 20×20, and large 40×40 size planar arrays with various values of L are shown.
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