Improving Precision Pointing of Monopulse Radars by Exploiting OAM Vortex Beams

We propose a new approach to the synthesis of circularring antenna arrays for monopulse radar applications. The developed design procedure takes advantage of Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) vortex beams as well as of the state-of-the-art approaches for the synthesis of reconfigurable sum and difference patterns. In particular, the classical solutions generating three reconfigurable beams, namely a pencil beam plus two difference patterns, are enhanced by adding a fourth pattern exploiting at best the capabilities of an OAM vortex.