Design of a Multiple-beam Cassegrain Antenna with Quasi-optical Isolator at 200 GHz for Target Tracking

Abstract

This letter proposes a multiple-beam Cassegrain antenna with quasi-optical isolator at 200 GHz for target tracking. The proposed antenna is designed with a special topology, in which a multichannel transceiver feed integrated with a quasi-optical isolator is designed and placed in the back of the main reflector, aiming to isolate the transmitting and receiving channels, and to avoid the aperture blockage. Four receiving feeds are laterally defocused to produce offset beams and each of them is received and sampled individually without comparators, which simplifies the structure and provides flexibility for signal processing. An optimization is performed to achieve the best compromise design considering the conflicts induced by its special structure. The fabricated antenna is measured and the results demonstrate an excellent radiation performance of the proposed antenna. Four well-performed offset beams are obtained as expected and the antenna works stably within a bandwidth of 10 GHz. The measured 3 dB beamwidths vary around 0.6° and the sidelobe levels are lower than −12.5 dB for all the beams. The superiorities of the proposed antenna show its potential application in high-performance tracking and imaging systems.