High Gain Planar Array Research Articles

Full-corporate-feed high-gain planar array antenna with cross-loop slots

ABSTRACT A novel cross-loop slot planar array antenna is presented. This design is started with the basic suspended stripline structure. The full-corporate-feed network is placed on the bottom grounded dielectric substrate. The cross-loop slots are located on the upper layer. The edge of the cross-loop slot is zigzag, which increases the effective surface current path. A prototype antenna with 8 × 8 cross-loop slots has been designed, fabricated, and measured. Results of measurement and simulation are well demonstrated to be in good agreement. The prototype has a wide impedance bandwidth (dB) of 11%. The broadside gain of the proposed antenna reaches up to 25.3 dBi at its working frequency of 5.8 GHz. The side lobes are suppressed down to −11 dB compared to the main beam level, and the cross-polarization levels in both E- and H-planes are reduced more than 30 dB.

High-Gain Planar Array of Reactively Loaded Antennas for Limited Scan Range Applications

This paper proposes a novel high-gain antenna element that can be used in antenna arrays that only require a limited scan range. Each high-gain antenna element uses a linear sub-array of highly-coupled open-ended waveguides. The active central element of this sub-array is directly fed, while the remaining passive waveguides are reactively loaded. The loads are implemented by short-circuits positioned at various distances from the radiating aperture. The short-circuit positions control the radiation pattern properties and the scattering parameters of the array. The proposed sub-array antenna element is optimized in the presence of the adjacent elements and provides a high gain and a flat-top main lobe. The horizontal distance between the sub-array centers is large in terms of wavelengths, which leads to limited scanning capabilities in the E-plane. However, along the vertical axis, the element spacing is around 0.6 wavelength at the central frequency that is beneficial to achieve a wider scan range in the H-plane. We show that the sub-array radiation pattern sufficiently filters the grating lobes which appear in the array factor along the E-plane. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed array configuration, an array operating at 28.0 GHz is designed. The designed array supports scan angles up to ±7.5° along the E-plane and ±24.2° along the H-plane

An FSS-Backed Broadband Phase-Shifting Surface Array With Multimode Operation

This paper presents a novel broadband phase-shifting surface (PSS) element with frequency-selective surface (FSS) backing, which could independently control the phase of transmitted/reflected waves at high/low frequencies. Using the appealing features of basic building block, a high gain planar array antenna is designed and implemented by employing a set of these spatially varied phase-shifting elements. Fed by a Vivaldi antenna, the fabricated array is composed of 9 × 9 elements, each carefully designed to exhibit the desired transmission/reflection phase at high/low frequencies. Numerical and experimental results indicate that the fabricated array is capable of showing the functionalities of transmitarray and reflectarray at different frequencies. The peak gain of either transmission or reflection beam was found to be 18.8 dB, which was at least 10 dB higher than that of bare feed source.

Half-Height-Pin Gap Waveguide Technology and Its Applications in High Gain Planar Array Antennas at Millimeter Wave Frequency

This paper presents a new form of gap waveguide technology -- the half-height-pin gap waveguide. {The gap waveguide technology is a new transmission line technology introduced recently, which makes use of the stopband of wave propagation created by a pair of parallel plates, one PEC (perfect electric conductor) and one PMC (perfect magnetic conductor), with an air gap in between less than a quarter of the wavelength at operation frequency. Applying this PEC/PMC gap plate structure to ridged waveguides, rectangular hollow waveguides and microstrip lines, we can have the ridged gap waveguides, groove gap waveguides and inverted gap waveguide microstrip lines, respectively, without requiring a conductive or galvanic contact between the upper PEC and the lower PMC plates. This contactless property of the gap waveguide technology relaxes significantly the manufacturing requirements for devices and antennas at millimeter wave frequencies. PMC material does not exist in nature, and an artificial PMC boundary can be made by such as periodic pin array with the pin length about a quarter wavelength. However, the quarter-wavelength pins, referred to as the full-height pins, are often too long for manufacturing. In order to overcome this difficulty, a new half-height-pin gap waveguide is introduced.} The working principles and Q factors for the half-height-pin gap waveguides are described, analyzed and verified with measurements in this paper. {It is concluded that half-height-pin gap waveguides have similar Q factors and operation bandwidth to the full-height-pin gap waveguides.} As an example of the applications, a high gain planar array antenna at V band by using the half-height-pin gap waveguide {has been designed and} is presented in the paper {with a good reflection coefficient and high aperture efficiency}.

Planar high gain antenna for 42.0 GHz Q‐LINK PAN system

ABSTRACTA high gain planar array antenna is reported in this article for recently proposed 42 GHz Q‐LINK PAN wireless communication system. The substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technique is deployed for the antenna array. Three types of power divider are used in the design to achieve a 30‐dB Taylor aperture distribution. Longitudinal slots etched on the broad surface of SIW are studied with an equivalent circuit. A high gain prototype which used 16 × 16 slots is designed with a center operation frequency of 42.5 GHz. For the measurement, a traditional rectangular waveguide to SIW transition is designed to feed the prototype. The low‐cost printed‐circuit‐board technology is used to fabricate the designed prototype, and the antenna is measured in a millimeter‐wave anechoic chamber. The measurement results show that the prototype can be operated from 41.5 to 43.7 GHz with a return loss larger than 10 dB. It has a maxim gain of 27.0 dB at 42.3 GHz. Low sidelobes of 26.3 and 17.3 dB are obtained for 42.5 GHz E‐plane and H‐plane radiation patters, respectively. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:2098–2103, 2014

High-gain planar array designed by using fragmented slots

A novel planar array antenna is proposed. It utilizes fragmented slots as its radiation elements and explores employing this highly flexible structure for achieving high gain. Each fragmented slot is gridded into 8 × 8 rectangular pixels, whose dimensions as well as conducting or nonconducting properties are optimized by the Genetic Algorithm GA in parallel on a PC cluster. A prototype antenna with 4 × 4 slots was designed, fabricated and measured. Both the simulation and measurement results show that this antenna possesses a high gain of 20.5 dBi at its working frequency of 5.8 GHz, and thus the corresponding aperture efficiency is up to 95%, which is much higher than that of the planar arrays with rectangular slots or split-ring resonator SRR slots. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:382-388, 2014.

Analysis of a high power microwave radial line slot antenna

A traditional radial line slot antenna (RLSA) is a high gain planar array. To improve the power handling capacity, we design a radial line slow wave structure which replaces a traditional dielectric sheet in the radial waveguide of the traditional RLSA. This high power microwave (HPM) RLSA is fed from a double-layered radial line waveguide to realize the directional radiation of the microwave. However, the track of the widen slot array on the upper waveguide could cause large reflection, which disturbs the normal antenna operation, accordingly a reflection canceling slot is added to the lower waveguide, the key technology employed in the design of the HPM RLSA and the antenna return-loss is effectively improved. This article mainly gives the design theory of this antenna, which is confirmed by the simulations and experiments. At 9.4 GHz, the calculated aperture efficiency reaches more than 40%, the reflectance is less than 0.1, the radiation efficiency is more than 99% and its measured power-handling capacity exceeds 700 MW.

A low-cost and very compact wireless terminal integrated on the back of a waveguide planar array for 26 GHz band fixed wireless access (FWA) systems

A compact wireless terminal (WT) with a high-gain planar array has been developed for the Wireless IP Access System (WIPAS), which is a point-to-multipoint Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) system in the 26 GHz band. For the point-to-multipoint FWA services in rural areas, the drastic cost and size reduction of WT with the high-gain antennas and RF module is indispensable. In this paper, remarkable cost reduction of 1/10 and downsizing of 1/5 are realized by using an alternating phase fed single layer waveguide array antenna and Microwave Monolithic IC (MMIC) technologies. This terminal is 190/spl times/190/spl times/55 mm/sup 3/ in volume and less than 2.0 kg in weight which accommodates over 31 dBi very high efficiency antenna with a radome, RF module, IF modules, application specific IC (ASIC) for modem, time division multiple access (TDMA) equipment control, and medium access control (MAC). Only an Ethernet cable with 24 V dc power supply is attached on the terminal.