S-Band Spline-Shaped Aperture-Stacked Patch Antenna for Air Traffic Control Applications

The design of the radiating elements of a S-band planar array for air traffic control applications is addressed. Toward this end, a novel aperture-stacked patch (ASP) is proposed that, unlike the state-of-the-art layouts, exploits a spline shape on the top layer of the ASP to give the designer more degrees-of-freedom to fit user-defined requirements over the whole operative bandwidth. The elementary radiator is synthesized by optimizing the key indicators of the radiation performance of the final planar arrangement instead of, as generally done, the single-element features. The analysis of both the single element and the array outcomes is carried out by means of full-wave simulations to assess the effectiveness of the proposed design as well as the matching with the design constraints.