A Simple Parasitic Antenna Array for Lowcost Beamforming

Parasitic element antennas are among the simplest antennas for basic beamforming, based on the works from Harrington’s in the 70’s. However, they suffer from limitations with only one driven element. This work presents an improvement of this principle with an array of parasitic elements with multiple excitations and an optimization of the matching while the beam is steered. A prototype in S-band has been measured to validate the ability of this parasitic antenna array and to demonstrate its tradeoff between performances and the simplicity of the design.