In this paper, a novel design strategy that integrates good radiation and broadband low radar cross section (RCS) characteristics based on the concept of metasurface is proposed. The metasurface element adopts an etched cross patch and it directly behaves as a radiating structure. After that, a metasurface-based thinned array antenna A1 and a checkerboard metasurface antenna A2 are designed. The -10 dB operating bandwidth of these two antennas is 13.08–14.92 GHz (13.1%). Compared with the conventional rectangular grid array, A1 and A2 have similar radiation performance along with in-band and out-of-band RCS reduction (RCSR) in any polarized normal incidence. Reasons and merits of different arrangements are analyzed. Simulated and measured results verify the effectiveness of the design strategy.