Studies of suppression of the reflected wave and beam-scanning features of the antenna arrays

Abstract

This paper describes a two-directional linear scanned design by integrating a short leaky-wave antenna (LWA) with aperture-coupled patch antenna arrays. This architecture proposes a technique not only having the advantage of suppressing the back-lobe due to the reflected wave in the short LWA but also producing two separate linearly scanned beams, each of them radiating in a different region of space (in both the front side and backside of the LWA). In this design, most of the reflected wave of the short LWA is coupled to the patch antenna arrays on the backside of the substrate. The phase of this coupled signal to each antenna element is adjusted by tuning the individual phase shifter in order to control electronically the patch antenna main beam in the cross plane (x<0). Meanwhile, on the front side, the main beam of the short LWA can be simultaneously scanned in the elevation plane (x>0) by changing the operating frequency. Hence, the two linear beam-scanning radiation patterns of individual direction can be created independently, including a narrow beam in the elevation plane (xy plane at x>0) at the front side and a broadside beam in the cross plane (xz plane at x<0) on the backside. The measured results show that the reflected wave of the short LWA in the proposed design is suppressed 8 dB as compared with a traditional short LWA without the aperture-coupled antenna arrays at 10.5 GHz. As a result, this novel architecture provides more flexibility both in the upward elevation plane (H plane) and the downward cross plane (backside-E plane) for possible beam-scanning applications in microwave communications and remote identification.