THE CARAMBA ANTENNA 



The CARAMBA program has been concerned with investigating techniques 

 of scanning a fan beam. Since the elevation pattern of the fan beam is the pattern 

 of an individual element in that plane, stacking of ring arrays results in the pencil 

 beam or, alternatively, a ring array using linear arrays parallel to the cylinder axis 

 as elements can produce the same pencil beam. Of concern here are methods of 

 beam-forming and phasing to obtain pencil beams from a cylindrical configuration 

 of elements, and the results of the CARAMBA program can be of use for this goal. 



The CARAMBA antenna consists of a ring array of 128 sectorial horns 

 embedded in a metallic cylinder of 13 wavelengths, fed by two methods: 



1. A unique lens-feed system which permits application of amplitude taper to 

 the array element terminals, and 



2. A digital amplitude and phase board which allows a variety of amplitude 

 and phase distributions to be applied to the terminals. 



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