Dash Mount Flat-Panel mmWave Antenna With Blind Spotless 2-Dimensional Coverage

A new flat-panel dash mount array antenna with wide-beamwidth fan-beam steering to provide hemispherical mmWave vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is proposed in this article. Unlike the typical patch-based phased array antennas with narrow beamwidth and limited scan angles, the proposed antenna can ensure blind spotless communication coverage in both elevation and azimuth angles, despite of its placement on a planar dash board. To verify the proposed dash mount array antenna, a single element was first fabricated and measured at 28 GHz. The measured half power beamwidth was 148.3° and 141.3° in E- and H- planes, respectively. Then, the proposed antenna was extended to a 1 × 16 phased array configuration and verified to have ±80° scan coverage in both elevation and azimuth angles. Furthermore, the proposed array antenna was placed on the vehicular dashboard to validate the blind-spotless mmWave communication with a 64-QAM over-the-air (OTA) test. The measured error vector magnitude (EVM) at 28 GHz was 7.5% with the incident signal angle at 80°, proving the feasibility of blind-spotless flat-panel antenna.