Designing of a Both-Sided MIC Starfish Microstrip Array Antenna for K-Band Application

Abstract

This paper represents a 2×2 microstrip starfish array antenna that shows a linearly polarized electromagnetic wave with high gain characteristics. The proposed antenna operates within K-band which is a suitable candidate for radar as well as satellite applications. This proposed antenna employs Both-sided MIC (Microwave Integrated Circuit) technology to get around of impedance matching problem of the conventional array antenna. The proposed antenna is excited with microstrip feed where the feeding network consists of parallel and series branches of both microstrip and slot line. Teflon glass fiber (ε <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">r</inf> = 2.1) of 0.8 mm thickness is used as a substrate where the main feed network is arranged upon it. Antenna shows a minimum reflection coefficient gain of -63 dB and the main lobe possesses a high magnitude of around 10.9 dBi at 18.75 GHz. Antenna shows impedance bandwidth of 230 MHz and more than 96% of total efficiency over the desired K-band of the frequency spectrum. CST Microwave Studio suite is used to explore all the simulated results of the proposed 4-element array antenna. The basic mechanism along with simulated results of the proposed array structure is discussed in this article.