Analysis and design of a low sidelobe level and wide-band aperture coupled microstrip antenna array using FDTD

This paper presents a low sidelobe level (SLL) and wide-band 8×8 aperture coupled microstrip antenna array. For rigorous analysis of element characteristics, a single aperture coupled microstrip antenna is analyzed using finite difference time domain (FDTD). Consideration imperfect ground planes in antenna and the finite structure, one finds that FDTD gives more precise results for element designing. To achieve improvement in SLL, Dolf-Chebyshev power distribution is used in the antenna design. Measured results demonstrate that the impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna is 12% at the center frequency of 5 GHz and average E-plane and H-plane SLL are less than −23 dB. The average gain of the antenna array is 22.5 dB.