Wideband Planar Array With Integrated Feed and Matching Network for Wide-Angle Scanning

It is traditionally known that wideband apertures lose bandwidth when placed over a ground plane. To overcome this issue, this paper introduces a new non-symmetric tightly coupled dipole element for wideband phased arrays. The proposed array antenna incorporates additional degrees of freedom to control capacitance and cancel the ground plane inductance. Specifically, each arm on the dipole is different than the other (or non-symmetric). The arms are identical near the center feed section but dissimilar towards the ends, forming a ball-and-cup. It is demonstrated that the non-symmetric qualities achieve wideband performance. Concurrently, a design example for planar installation with balun and matching network is presented to cover X-band. The balun avoids extraneous radiation, maintains the array's low-profile height and is printed on top of the ground plane connecting to the array aperture with 180° out of phase vertical twin-wire transmission lines. To demonstrate the concept, a 64-element array with integrated feed and matching network is designed, fabricated and verified experimentally. The array aperture is placed λ/7 (at 8 GHz) above the ground plane and shown to maintain a active VSWR less than 2 from 8-12.5 GHz while scanning up to 70° and 60° in E- and H-plane, respectively. The array's simulated diagonal plane cross-polarization is approximately 10 dB below the co-polarized component during 60° diagonal scan and follows the theoretical limit for an infinite current sheet.