Design and Experiment of a Near-Zero-Thickness High-Gain Transmit-Reflect-Array Antenna Using Anisotropic Metasurface

Combining a reflectarray and a transmitarray together, a novel array antenna with bidirectional high-gain beams is proposed in this paper. A novel single-layer metalonly defected square-ring slot element, which has a near-zero thickness, is introduced as the phasing element. Full 360° phase shift range is achieved by utilizing the cross-polarized field of the phasing element. As a bidirectional high-gain antenna (bi-HGA), a transmit-reflect-array using the proposed elements is then designed, fabricated, and measured. It is only composed of a thin metallic sheet with 420 mm side length, spatially fed by a corrugated horn. Well-defined pencil beams are formed in broadside directions on both sides. The measured gains of the transmitted and reflected beams at 10 GHz are 25.5 dBi with 15% 1 dB gain bandwidth and 25 dBi with 14% 1 dB gain bandwidth, respectively. The proposed bi-HGA exhibits distinctive advantages of being ultrathin (0.0067λ
₀
), lightweight, and low cost without using dielectric substrates, and is a promising candidate for bidirectional wireless communication applications.