Design & analysis of rectangular microstrip patch antenna linear array using binomial distribution

Microstrip or patch antennas are increasingly used because they can be directly printed onto a circuit board. Microstrip antennas find widespread use within the mobile phone market. Patch antennas are easy to fabricate, cost less, and have a low profile. Microstrip antennas can be easily integrated into arrays or with microwave integrated circuits, or polarization diversity. Hence microstrip antennas are vastly applied in radars, satellite communications, electronic countermeasure etc. In this paper rectangular patch antenna linear arrays are designed and analysed using FEKO software. Different number of elements are taken in a linear array and analysed for uniform and binomial distributions. The elements are placed uniformly at a distance of lambda/2 apart. The observations are tabulated and graphs plotted. It was noted that the difference in the gain of the array for uniform and binomial distributions was increased as the number of elements in the array increased. No sidelobe was observed for 4 and 5 element linear array but very small sidelobe levels were observed for 11 element array for binomial distribution as compared to the uniform distribution.