Broadband Statistically Designed Thinned-Binned Array Antennas

Statistically thinned arrays are obtained by thinning a reference filled array, according to a probabilistic law that is dictated by the reference current. The remaining radiators are still separated by commensurable distances, even if randomly located. Hence, wideband operations are prevented by grating lobes' occurrence. To overcome the above limitation, a new and simple strategy is presented in this article for randomly deploying the elemental radiators across the array aperture. More in detail, unlike classic thinned arrays, elements surviving the thinning are not positioned on a priori fixed deterministic lattice. Instead, their positions are modeled as random variables, which are determined by exploiting the binned strategy. Numerical examples reveal that the new proposed scheme allows for a considerable enlargement of the frequency band, without incurring in grating lobes' appearance.