How does one model a rotating antenna for an ATC radar in phased array?

I only see the following antenna types; 1. phased.CosineAntennaElement Cosine antenna 2. phased.CustomAntennaElement Custom antenna 3. phased.IsotropicAntennaElement Isotropic antenna And one can only specify linear motion. Is there They dont have a place where you can specify rotation rate of the antenna itself..

Answer 1

[Honglei Chen]

Hi Keketso,

Phased Array System Toolbox currently does not have built in support for rotating motion. However, it is possible to write some custom code to simulate the case by keep tracking the difference between the target direction and the orientation direction. For example, if you have a target at 30 degrees azimuth and the rotation rate is 1 rpm. Then the antenna response for this particular target, assuming a cosine pattern, can be simulated as

hant = phased.CosineAntennaElement;
fc = 3e8;
t = 0:59;
rot_rate = 360/60;
tgt_ang = 30;
resp = zeros(1,numel(t));
for m = 1:numel(t)
  in_ang = wrapTo180(tgt_ang - rot_rate*t(m));
  resp(m) = step(hant,fc,in_ang);
end

You can see the array response toward the target over time by plotting

plot(t,abs(resp))

If you need any further clarification, feel free to drop me a note.