A reconfigurable antenna construction toolkit with modular slotted waveguide elements for arbitrary pattern designs

This contribution presents a universal antenna construction toolkit with slotted waveguide elements which can flexibly be combined to form a reconfigurable antenna array capable of providing arbitrary symmetric radiation patterns. The design and the arrangement of radiating elements allow adjusting arbitrary real amplitudes of single radiating elements in a solely mechanical way without any electrical feeding network. Additional modular connecting elements even allow two dimensional and conformal antenna designs with circular or linear polarizations. With a single toolkit in the Ku-band several design and measurement examples are presented, such as a linear array forming a desired main lobe down to −20 dB, and a universal two dimensional antenna array that can switch between vertical, horizontal, LHC and RHC polarization. The waveguide toolkit is easily scalable to any other frequency band just being limited in the upper frequency by manufacturing issues. This universal antenna toolkit allows an accurate realization of antenna footprints for scattering measurements, but is also well-suited to teach group antenna theory and related measurements in a very flexible and interactive manner.