In this work we consider dipole antenna arrays of both active and passive dipole elements. The traditional approach assumes sinusoidal current distributions. Herein, we obtain the exact distribution from the Hallen equations using the Method of Moments (MoM). We show that the current distributions on the dipole elements can deviate significantly from the sinusoidal approximation. Optimizing the active and passive elements to maximize the gain; constitutes a non-convex optimization problem. To circumvent this difficulty, we develop an efficient algorithm that yields close to optimal results which are demonstrated by numerical evaluations and verified with simulations.