Wide-Band Slot Antenna Arrays With Single-Layer Corporate-Feed Network in Ridge Gap Waveguide Technology

Single-layer, wideband, and low-loss corporate-feed networks for slot antenna arrays are described. The antenna is built using ridge gap waveguide technology, formed between two parallel metal plates without the requirements of electrical contact between these plates. The corporate-feed network is realized by a texture of pins and a guiding ridge in the bottom plate, and the radiating slots are placed in the smooth top plate. The paper describes two test antennas: a 4 × 1 linear slot array and a 2 × 2 planar slot array. Both have been fabricated and tested at Ku- band. The linear array shows more than 20% bandwidth and the 2 × 2 array shows a bandwidth of 21% for 10-dB return loss. There are good agreements between measured and simulated patterns for both antennas. Measured gain for the planar array is found to be at least 12.2 dBi over 12-15 GHz band.