A Beam Steering Horn Antenna Using Active Frequency Selective Surface

In this communication, a novel filtering antenna is proposed by utilizing active frequency selective surface (FSS), which can simultaneously achieve filtering and beam steering function. The FSS unit is composed of a metallic rectangular ring and a patch, with a pair of microwave varactor diodes inserted in between along incident electric field polarization direction. Transmission phase of the emitted wave can be tuned by changing the bias voltage applied to the varactor diodes. Through different configurations of the bias voltages, we can obtain the gradient phase distribution of the emitted wave along E- and H-plane. This active FSS is then fabricated and utilized as a radome above a conventional horn antenna to demonstrate its ability of steering the beam radiated from the horn. The experimental results agree well with the simulated ones, which show that the horn antenna with the active FSS can realize beam steering in both E- and H-plane in a range of $\pm 30^{\circ}$ at 5.3 GHz with a bandwidth of 180 MHz.