Wideband L/X-Band Shared-Aperture Phased Array Antenna for SAR Applications

Abstract

In this article, a wideband shared-aperture phased array antenna is proposed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) applications. A metal cavity-backed slot antenna and a slot antenna are used as the L- and X-band antenna elements, respectively. Notably, the X-band antenna elements are mounted on top of the L-band ones, and their interactions are successfully isolated by loading a layer of frequency selective surface (FSS). The FSS layer reflects the electromagnetic waves in X-band and allows transmission of the L-band electromagnetic waves, making the shared-aperture antenna work properly in L- and X-bands. Furthermore, a circular patch is designed to improve the bandwidth of the X-band antenna. Simulations indicate that the proposed antenna has impedance bandwidths of 46% in X-band (7.5–12 GHz) and 21% in L-band (1.7–2.1 GHz). Moreover, the X-band antenna can scan up to ±60° in the E-plane and ±30° in the H-plane with voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) below 3. To verify the design method, a shared-aperture antenna prototype, which consists of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6\times6$ </tex-math></inline-formula> X-band elements and one L-band element, has been fabricated and measured. Finally, the measured results agree well with the simulated ones.