Abstract
This paper proposes the design of a single radiator monopulse antenna with a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) multi-mode feeding system to reduce the aperture size and simplify the feeding structure. The proposed antenna can effectively reduce the overall system size by using a single patch radiator, compared to conventional systems that require multiple radiators. In addition, to simplify the structure of the pattern comparator we use a SIW multi-mode feeding system with TE10 and TE20 modes. To verify the feasibility, the patch antenna with the SIW multi-mode feed is fabricated, and its antenna characteristics of reflection coefficients, mutual coupling, and radiation patterns are measured in a full anechoic chamber. The accuracy of the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is further improved by applying the derived calibration factor to the resulting sum and difference ratio. The results demonstrate that the proposed antenna is suitable for compact and lightweight monopulse systems with the single radiator and the simple multi-mode feeding network.
Highlights
Monopulse systems have been widely used for target tracking in various military purposes such as missile seeker, a shipborne satellite communication (SATCOM) station, an airborne-based sense and avoid (ABSAA) and satellite tracking [1,2,3,4,5]
We propose a novel design structure of the monopulse antenna system that can operate with only a single radiator to reduce the aperture size, where the complicated waveguide comparator is replaced by the simple planar substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) multi-mode feeding network that can obtain the ratio of sum and difference patterns
The two ports in the SIW feeding network transmit transverse electric (TE)10 and TE20 modes to the single patch antenna, respectively, resulting in the sum and difference radiation patterns
Summary
Monopulse systems have been widely used for target tracking in various military purposes such as missile seeker, a shipborne satellite communication (SATCOM) station, an airborne-based sense and avoid (ABSAA) and satellite tracking [1,2,3,4,5] In such applications, the monopulse systems typically detect the direction of targets using the amplitude ratio of the sum and difference channels of the received signals [6,7]. We propose a novel design structure of the monopulse antenna system that can operate with only a single radiator to reduce the aperture size, where the complicated waveguide comparator is replaced by the simple planar SIW multi-mode feeding network that can obtain the ratio of sum and difference patterns. The results demonstrate that the proposed antenna, with its single radiator and simple multi-mode feeding network, is suitable for compact and lightweight monopulse systems
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