An UHF to L band dual‐polarized wide‐angle scanning tapered slot phased array with tightly coupled structure

Abstract

This article presents a novel dual-polarized tightly coupled tapered slot antenna (TC-TLA) array. With increased capacitive coupling effects of U-shaped metallic channels of adjacent flare-arms of TLA elements, the operational bandwidth for broadside scan increases from 4.4:1 to 5.7:1, and the bandwidth at a 50° scan increases from 3.1:1 to 5.7:1, compared with the conventional TLA array. The proposed TC-TLA array delivers over 0.35–2 GHz bandwidth, ±50° scanning coverage in the horizontal plane with an active VSWR < 3.5, and <−20 dB cross-polarization. Prototype for a 4 × 22 dual-polarized TC-TLA array fed by 1 to 4 wide-band power dividers is fabricated and measured. Good agreement is achieved between numerical and measured results.