Broadband and high gain waveguide‐fed slot antenna array in the Ku‐band

Abstract

A broadband and high‐gain slot antenna array operating in the Ku‐band is reported in this study. The antenna is with waveguide‐fed cavity backed configuration and made entirely via simple milling process. The overall antenna structure consists of four layers. The bottom layer is a waveguide feed network to provide corporate power division. In turn, the waveguide feed network is excited by a conventional coaxial probe from the back. The waveguide network couples energy to an array of cavity via an aperture plate. These constitute the middle two layers. Each cavity then excites a subarray of 2 × 2 radiating slots in the top layer. The radiating slot elements and the feed network are designed to achieve wide bandwidth and high‐gain performance. Finally, an 8 × 8 array antenna has been designed and fabricated with about 25 dBi gain over 14.8% bandwidth, and the cross‐polarisation was around −30 dB in the boresight.

A Low VSWR and High Efficiency Waveguide Feed Antenna Array

“…Figure 2 shows the 2 × 2 subarray configuration with related structural parameters, and it is also comprised of three parts. The working mechanisms of the proposed subarray are as follows: (1) the energy is coupled from the -plane waveguide at the bottom layer to the resonant cavity located at the middle layer via the coupling slot; (2) there are two pairs of side walls in the cavity for the purpose of splitting the resonant higher mode, which is similar to those reported in [4,8]; (3) the 2 × 2 radiation slots on the top share the same resonant cavity. Due to the fact that the higher mode resonant can also be excited, the radiation slots can be equally excited.…”

“…However, because it is difficult to achieve high-temperature and uniform pressure during the manufacturing process for a largescale array, this unique fabrication method is not suitable for array fabrication in the "lower" frequency band, such as those in the Ku band. Therefore, a multilayer corporatefeed slot antenna array was proposed and fabricated by using simple milling process [8][9][10]. Nonetheless, the wave leakage between layers of this reported antenna array cannot be avoided, because the feeding network used here is an -plane waveguide type.…”

“…The antenna array is a multilayer type composed mainly of three layers, namely, the antenna radiation slots, resonant cavity, and feeding network, from top to bottom, respectively. The 2 × 2 element subarrays employed as one unit here are for the purpose of minimizing the occurrence of grating lobe as much as possible [4,8]. The design of feeding network adopts the -plane waveguide type, so that wave leakage can be prevented after the assembly.…”

Application of X-ray scanning to diagnose internal details of waveguide antenna fabricated by 3-D metal-direct-printing technique

“…Basically, the antenna array consists of four layers: a corporate-feed waveguide network at the bottom most layer, an aperture plate, a cavity plate and a radiating slot plate at the top most layer. The feed-network is made up of a group of H-plane T-shaped waveguide junctions with equal power division [6]. The radiating slot plate is comprised of 4×4 of 2×2-element uniform-excited subarrays.…”

Design and simulation of an analog beamforming phased array antenna

“…The IF phase shifting is implemented in this research because it can provide much better performance compared to RF and LO phase shifting [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. The slotted waveguide antenna array is selected because it can provide high power handling capability, low loss, small size, narrow beamwidth, good bandwidth, and high gain [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. This paper is organized as follows.…”