Design of a resonant edge-slot waveguide array for the Lightweight Rainfall Radiometer (LRR)

Several X-band resonant edge-slot waveguide arrays were designed and fabricated for the passive X-band radiometer being flown on the NASA Lightweight Rainfall Radiometer (LRR) aircraft mission. The advantage of this antenna for aperture synthesis between adjacent linear arrays is described along with detailed description of a modern technique for designing resonant edge-slot waveguide arrays. What made this achievement most noteworthy was this historically difficult design was accomplished at very low cost without manufacturing any hardware prototypes and the antenna was very well-optimized. This paper summarizes the development effort, and present engineering design curves used to create this low-sidelobe antenna design and data measured from the radiometer antenna.