Meandered Waveguides for Active Antennas

Meandered Waveguides are novel RF components which may play a disruptive role in phased array antennas. They permit to guarantee low propagation losses, comparable to the ones of conventional waveguides, combined with an increased freedom in defining their path, comparable with the one associated to flexible coaxial cables. In addition, meandered waveguides can provide a full control of the phase, which is fundamental to design Beam Forming Networks. Additive Manufacturing represents today the best technology to realize meandered waveguides with improvements in terms of cost, complexity, accommodation, and accuracy. In the paper in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of meandered waveguides possible exploitations in active arrays and discrete constrained lenses are proposed.