A hybrid approach for the optimal synthesis of pencil beams through array antennas

A hybrid approach to the synthesis of excitations and locations of nonuniformly spaced arrays in order to achieve optimal focusing in any given direction is proposed and discussed. The approach takes definite advantage from the convexity of the problem with respect to excitation variables, and exploits a Simulated Annealing procedure as far as location variables are concerned. The corresponding synthesized patterns outperform previously known results in standard benchmark problems.