An 8 × 8 ultra‐wideband tightly coupled dipole active phased array

Abstract

An 8 × 8 ultra-wideband tightly coupled dipole active phased array with 64 T/R modules is presented in this paper. The proposed active phased array with 64 T/R modules is able to operate over a 5:1 bandwidth (2.05 ~ 10.3 GHz) in receiving mode and 8 ~ 10 GHz in transmitting mode. The array utilized tightly coupled balanced antipodal dipole antenna elements, which exhibits excellent scanning performance (±60° in E plane, ±60° in D plane and ±45° in H plane) and low cross-polarization characteristic (<−28 dB at broadside). The tiled transmitting/receiving modules (T/R modules) can successfully control the amplitude and phase of the feeding signal in each active channel. Besides, the total gain of all channels in receiving mode and transmitting mode are 30 and 26.4 dB, respectively, which shows good performances in receiving and transmitting signals. A prototype of 16 × 16 antenna array is fabricated. The central 8 × 8 elements are active elements that are connected to 64 channels T/R module. The remaining elements are dummy elements that are connected to 50Ω loads to alleviate the edge effect. The measurements of central 8 × 8 elements are taken after the assembling of the antenna array and T/R modules. Good performances are achieved and the application potential of this phased array system is also validated.