A Novel Antenna Concept for Weather Applications Based on a Cylindrical Parabolic Reflector

Wide adoption of phased array weather radars based on large active panels has been limited so far by an intrinsic cost increase respect to bi-axial mechanically steered solutions. A novel antenna concept is proposed to achieve a more cost effective solution by decoupling gain generation and electronic steering. A simple parabolic cylinder with active feed for electronic steering in elevation, mechanically rotated in azimuth, is shown to yield acceptable degradation of the cross-polarization performance of the feed.