Electronically Steerable 1-D Fabry-Perot Leaky-Wave Antenna Employing a Tunable High Impedance Surface

Abstract

A novel fixed-frequency electronically-steerable one-dimensional (1-D) leaky-wave antenna is presented. The antenna is based on a parallel-plate waveguide loaded with a planar partially reflective surface and a tunable high impedance surface (HIS), which creates a 1-D Fabry-Perot leaky-waveguide. The tunable HIS consists of printed patches loaded with varactor diodes that allow the electronic tuning of the cavity resonance condition. Using a simple Transverse Equivalent Network, it is theoretically shown how the variation of the varactors' junction capacitance allows the scanning of the antenna pointing angle from broadside towards the endfire direction at a fixed frequency. Experimental results of an antenna prototype operating at 5.6 GHz are reported, demonstrating that the new reconfigurable leaky-wave antenna can provide electronic beam scanning in an angular range from 9 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$^{\circ}$</tex></formula> to 30 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$^{\circ}$</tex></formula>