Broadband antenna array aperture made of tightly couple printed dipoles

Abstract

This study reports a novel tight-coupled dipole array antenna to operate with up to six octave bandwidth and 60 degrees scanning. The array was designed through full-wave EM simulations by employing the current sheet array radiator concept that was advanced by a novel integrated feed network. Several prototypes of planar and conformal arrays across 0.3-20 GHz have been fabricated and tested with good agreement observed between all predicted and measured terminal and radiation features. The exemplified arrays have been designed for 1.2-6 GHz with relative radiator height 0.12 of maximum operational wavelength.