Design of High Gain and High Steering Angle Matrix Antenna for Electronic Warfare Application

This article presents a matrix antenna composed of unit pixels, operating in the L-band and designed for signal jamming applications. By filling the cavity of a pixel element with dielectric, the size of the overall element was reduced to 0.31 * A at 1.2 GHz. This low size coupled with the performances of the pixels allows to achieve a wide steering angle of 70° over a bandwidth of 1.21 GHz to 1.6 GHz. The matrix, composed of 11 such pixels, is able to achieve this wide steering angle while maintaining low side-lobes levels at less than −9.3 dB.