Low sidelobe light weight microstrip antenna array for battlefield surveillance radars

The paper describes the design realisation of a (32 /spl times/ 16) element microstrip antenna array in X-band, offering high performance features applicable to battlefield surveillance radars. The new planar array configuration realised, utilises optimised inset fed square patch elements distributed on a small size aperture, with a low loss multilayer hybrid corporate feed network designed for a low sidelobe Taylor's amplitude distribution. The novel microstrip antenna array, designed, fabricated, in numbers and tested, has offered a fairly wide bandwidth (4%) in X-band, a high gain (>30 dB) with a good return loss (< -15 dB) and low sidelobe (> -25 dB) pattern performance through the bandwidth, and weighs only 1.2 kg with its back-up structure.