SUPER DILATED NESTED ARRAYS WITH IDEAL CRITICAL WEIGHTS AND INCREASED DEGREES OF FREEDOM

In this paper, two further dilations of the recently introduced dilated nested arrays (DNAs), which possess an equal virtual ULA part to that of a nested array but possess two dense physical ULAs with the critical spacing (2 × λ/2), are introduced. With having the parent array number of uniform DOFs unchanged, in the first dilation, the first dense ULA can be rearranged Q_f times, such that all the sensor pairs with the critical inter-sensor spacing therein are completely disposed of in a designated Qth-order dilated nested array, for 2 ≤ Q ≤ Q_f +1, while in the second dilation called the super dilated nested array (SDNA), the second dense ULA in Qth-order DNAs is also rearranged, so as to have fixed weights as those of a co-prime array. Numerical examples are included to demonstrate the superior performance of these arrays.