A Low-Profile Ultra-Wideband and Wide-scanning Phased Array Loaded with Star-Shaped Patches

This paper presents a low-profile tightly coupled dipole antenna (TCDA). A meta-surface-based wide angle impedance matching layer (WAIM) is used to improve the beam scanning ability and lower the antenna profile, which consists of the star-shaped patches loaded on the dipole element. Consequently, the array achieves a 5.2:1 impedance bandwidth (0.48-2.5GHz) while scanning up to 60° in E-plane for active VSWR <3.0. The proposed antenna has a very low profile, which is only
$\mathbf{0.065}\boldsymbol{\lambda}$
low at the lowest operating frequency.