A 1-Bit All-Metal Wide-Angle and Multipolarization Beam-Scanning Reconfigurable Reflectarray Antenna

Abstract

In this letter, a 1-bit wide-angle and multi-polarization beam-scanning reconfigurable reflectarray antenna (RRA) is designed, fabricated and measured. The proposed RRA element consists of a square base, a circular turntable and three butterfly staircases with different heights based on 3D all-metal structure. The 1-bit reflected phase and orthogonal linear polarization reconfigurability can be achieved by rotating the proposed RRA element. Then, an all-metal RRA prototype with 26 × 26 rotational elements are fabricated, which is fed by a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</i> -polarized corrugated horn with 20° inclination. The multi-polarization scanning beams are generated by dynamically rotating individual element on the aperture. The measured results show that the RRA prototype can achieve a 60° beam scanning with maximum scan loss of 3.3 dB in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</i> -polarization, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">y</i> -polarization and circular polarization at 10.0 GHz. The peak gains of 27.2 dBi, 26.7 dBi and 27.1 dBi with aperture efficiency of 24.7%, 22.0% and 24.2% are obtained where the 1-dB gain bandwidth is 24.0%, 14% and 18% for <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</i> -polarization, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">y</i> -polarization and LHCP. The proposed RRA greatly reduces the cost, complexity and RF loss.