Wide-angle scanning linear phased arrays based on wide-beam magneto electric dipole antenna

Microstrip phased array has aroused interest of many researchers because of its beam agility. However, a big problem for typical microstrip array is that its main beam can only scan from about -50° to 50°, with a gain loss of 4-5 dB. Meanwhile, the relatively narrow operating bandwidth of microstrip antenna is also a problem in application. These flaws have dramatically limited its applications and spawned many studies on phased array with wide-angle scanning capability. Several methods have been proposed to broaden the scanning coverage of phased array, such as utilizing pattern-reconfigurable antenna as an element of array, taking wide-beam antenna as the element of array, and adopt metasurface as the top cladding of array. However, most of existing researches mainly focus on achieving wide-angle scanning performance within a relatively narrow bandwidth. A phased array that possesses wide-angle scanning capability at both main planes within a relatively wide bandwidth is highly desirable. In this paper, a wide-beam magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna is proposed. It consists of an ME dipole antenna in the form of microstrip patch and a pair of magnetic dipoles. Metallic through holes integrated with patches and ground are utilized to form magnetic currents. Extra magnetic dipoles are added to broaden the 3-dB beam-width. The simulated results reveal that the 3-dB beam-width of the proposed antenna is greater than 107° in the E-plane (9 GHz-12 GHz) and 178° in the H-plane (7 GHz-12 GHz) respectively. The impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna is 53.26% from 7.3 GHz to 12.6 GHz (VWSR Copyright © 2021 Acta Physica Sinica. All rights reserved.