Sliding Slot Arrays for Mechanical Beam Steering of Low-Profile Pillbox Antennas for Low-Earth-Orbit Satellite Communications

A low-profile pillbox antenna with mechanical beam steering is introduced for millimeter-wave applications. The antenna has two layers of long slots, one fixed and one movable. By sliding the movable layer, different sets of slots are exposed, which allows to generate leaky-wave radiation at different angles. A simple pillbox antenna is used to demonstrate the proposed method. Simulations show that beam steering is realized with the sliding movement. To illustrate the concept, an antenna is designed for operation at 20 GHz with 0.7 GHz bandwidth and 28 dBi maximum gain.