Widening multi-beam scan angle of conventional waveguide lens antennas by increasing focal points for multi-feed excitations

This paper presents an alternative approach to improve the achievable beam scan angle of a traditional multi-beam waveguide lens antenna. Due to the focusing mechanism by manipulating the geometrical curvatures of the waveguide lens, the angular scan range is limited in the conventional waveguide lens design using dual-focal points of excitations because the geometrical curvatures of the waveguide lens only provide two design freedoms. To overcome this limitation, a solution of treating the waveguide lens as a transmit array consisting of non-identical elements is proposed so that each element of the antenna array can be well calibrated to improve the maximum scan angular range, where a third focus point of excitation can be created by adding another design freedom from the differentiation between non-identical elements. Each element of this new transmitting array can be well calibrated with the help of a mathematical expression to improve the maximum angular scan range. Numerical simulations show that the proposed antenna architecture exhibits better radiation characteristics than the traditional waveguide lens antenna. Radiation characteristics are studied and compared for both types of lens antennas to validate the design concept. The proposed triple-focal point provides a higher gain than the traditional lens antenna with fewer antenna elements. The gains of the beams at ±10°, ±20°, ±30°, and ±40° are found to be 27.78, 26.94, 26.19, and 24.04 dBi, respectively. From the comparison, it is seen that the variation in gain by the proposed triple-focal array design is more stable than the conventional dual-focal point design.