Design of Joinable Antenna Array With Wide-Angle Scanning

Generally, thedimension of the antenna arrays is fixed after manufacturing, limiting their radiation characteristics. Due to the existence of interconnected characteristics between elements in a tightly coupled dipole array (TCDA), this letter proposes a novel modular TCDA design with joinable components. The parasitic metal strip in the H-plane facilitates the deigned planar dual-polarized TCDA, which employs the joinable design to achieve an impedance bandwidth of 9.4:1 [(1 to 9.4) GHz], with an active voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) of less than 3. Additionally, it enables beam scanning up to 80° in E/H-plane. Specifically, an arbitrary dimension of TCDA can be assembled in a short time and all units can be reused. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the concept of joinable design introduced in ultrawide and wide-angle scanning TCDAs is presented for the first time.

I. Introduction

Recent advancements in radar detection and sensing, combined with smaller, more efficient antenna platforms, have created a growing demand for multifunctional ultra-wideband (UWB) phased arrays. Therefore, it requires that the phased array antenna is featured with large bandwidth, wide-angle scanning, high gain, and other wide-spread applications.While phased array antennas like Vivaldi arrays or tapered slot arrays offer impressive decade-wide bandwidths, they often suffer from substantial size and weight limitations [1]. To circumvent this predicament, a tightly coupled dipole array (TCDA) with the merit of broadband, enhanced scan performance, and compact size has been introduced in [2], [3], and [4]. Combined with interconnect characteristics on the edge, TCDA is a potential choice for the application in the miniaturized UWB wireless systems.