In this study, the authors present a beam scanning lens antenna for 30 GHz applications, which is composed of a feed horn and a planar lens with parabolic phase distribution. Due to the parabolic phase compensation, the lens antenna can perform the scanning coverage of ±60° with a gain tolerance of 3 dB. The fabricated lens has a size of 10λ0 × λ0 × 0.2λ0 (λ0 is wavelength at the centre frequency of 30 GHz) and the focal length of 24 mm. The beam steering mechanism and the phase error of the lens antenna are analysed in detail. The total system has the advantages of wide scan angle, low profile and lightweight, and it can be readily applied to multi‐beam or beam‐scanning antenna designs.

A fan‐beam antenna system based on metasurface lenses is proposed for backhaul antenna applications at 10.4 GHz. The planar metasurface lens is composed of three pairs of subwavelength unit cells with high transmission and opposite phase. These phase shifters are arranged to transform the Gaussian distributed near field from a linear patch antenna array into the sin c‐function distributed aperture field, which in turn brings a sector radiation pattern in the azimuth plane and a pencil beam in the elevation plane. The simulated and measured results demonstrate that the presented lens antenna offers a sharp roll‐off fan beam with the azimuth beamwidth 60°, elevation beamwidth 10°, and the gain 18.2 dB with the flat‐top ripple less than 2.0 dB.