A Dual-Polarized Leaky Lens Antenna for Wideband Focal Plane Arrays

This paper presents the design and measurements of a wideband dual polarized leaky lens antenna suitable for tightly spaced focal plane arrays. The antenna is composed of two crossed leaky slots fed by two orthogonal microstrips to realize the dual-polarization operation. The crossed microstrips are fed differentially in order to couple the radiation into the slots. The slots are then coupled to a dielectric lens to achieve directive patterns suited for feeding large Focal distance to Diameter ratio reflectors. In this paper, the proposed leaky lens antenna is optimized to achieve high aperture efficiency with clean symmetric patterns in both polarizations exceeding an octave bandwidth. The concept is validated by the measurements of the primary fields inside the lens and with GRASP simulations of the focal plane array.