Wide band electronically scannable leaky wave antenna for low cost beam steering applications

In this paper, we present an innovative wide-band, beam steering antenna which is operating in the higher order leaky-mode. The antenna is loaded with log-periodic slots which results a wide bandwidth of 21.36 % over the -10dB resonating band of 4.6 to 5.7 GHz. The pencil beam pattern in the H-plane is frequency scannable over the wide, -10dB band and is also scannable at fixed frequency by reactive loading. A maximum beam steering of about 15/spl deg/ is observed experimentally by changing the loaded reactance from 2.2 pF to 4.7 pF.