Experimental Demonstration of a Supergain Three-Dipole-End-Fire-Array

This paper presents the experimental validation of a three-dipole array optimized for maximum gain. The complex excitation coefficients associated to the array are calculated using a synthesis procedure based on the array factor. A parasitic array architecture has been selected to implement the proposed antenna solution. The high gain reached (8.6 dBi for a ka of 1.4) shows the interest of the proposed optimization method. Furthermore, it was shown that this optimization method decreases the sensitivity to errors in the dipole excitation coefficients at the cost of a lower directivity compared to the superdirectivity.