A Low-Profile Distributed Conformal Phased Array Antenna with Hemispherical Beam Coverage

A novel low-profile distributed conformal phased array antenna (DCPAA) with hemispherical beam coverage is presented in this paper. All conventional spherical phased array antennas (SPAAs) have large beam coverage but high profile because of their spherical carrier. In this design, the proposed low-profile DCPAA is reconfigured by readjusting positions and directions of some antenna elements on the conventional SPAA symmetrically. Elements in distributed areas of the DCPAA cooperate to realize the distributed virtual aperture synthesis. In this case, the low-profile DCPAA can roughly keep the original effective radiation aperture of the SPAA and their performances are almost the same. Thus, the profile of the proposed DCPAA is 44.45% lower than that of the SPAA. In addition, the gain flatness of the low-profile DCPAA is as same as that of the SPAA (1.3 dB) within hemispherical beam coverage. Moreover, the DCPAA has only 0.5 dB gain loss within the scanning range compared with the SPAA.