A Ferrite-Loaded Large-Curvature Conformal Ultrawideband Tightly Coupled Dipole Array

A ferrite-loaded ultra-wideband large-curvature conformal tightly coupled dipole array (LCC-TCDA) is presented in this paper. The conformal array element consists of 6 perfectly fitting tightly coupled dipoles upon the layer of the profile. To expand the operation bandwidth and reduce the profile, overlapping patches are used to enhance capacitive coupling between adjacent dipoles, and ferrite pieces with high relative permeability and permittivity characteristic are loaded above the metal ground plane. A novel multi-functional feeding network is designed carefully to steer the beam and transform the impedance simultaneously, by which only a single input port is needed. Consequently, the proposed conformal array element enables to adapt some limited installation spaces and reduces the number of required transmit/receive (T/R) modules. Simulation results show that this antenna is able to operate within 0.28-1.96 GHz with an active VSWR < 3.0 and scanning up to ±60°in the azimuth plane.