Design of Joinable Antenna Array With Wide-Angle Scanning

Generally, thedimension of the antenna arrays is fixed after manufacturing, limiting their radiation characteristics. Due to the existence of interconnected characteristics between elements in a tightly coupled dipole array (TCDA), this letter proposes a novel modular TCDA design with joinable components. The parasitic metal strip in the H-plane facilitates the deigned planar dual-polarized TCDA, which employs the joinable design to achieve an impedance bandwidth of 9.4:1 [(1 to 9.4) GHz], with an active voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) of less than 3. Additionally, it enables beam scanning up to 80° in E/H-plane. Specifically, an arbitrary dimension of TCDA can be assembled in a short time and all units can be reused. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the concept of joinable design introduced in ultrawide and wide-angle scanning TCDAs is presented for the first time. © 2002-2011 IEEE.