| Summary: | The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, the trade-off between directivity, beam-width, side-lobe-level, number of radiating elements, and scanning range of planar antenna arrays is reviewed, and some simple ready-to-use formulas for the preliminary dimensioning of equispaced planar arrays are provided. Furthermore, the synthesis of sparse planar arrays, and the issue of their reduction in directivity, is analyzed. Second, a simple, yet effective, novel approach to overcome the directivity issue is proposed. The presented method is validated by several synthesized layouts; the examples show that it is possible to synthesize sparse arrays, able to challenge with equispaced lattices in terms of directivity, with a significant reduction of the number of radiators.
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