Wide Angle Scanning Reconfigurable Beam Steering Antenna

A wide-angle scanning reconfigurable beamsteering parasitic patch array antenna is introduced in this paper. For beam-steering antennas using microstrip, the beam scanning range is very limited where the typically achieved scanning is in the range of -30 degrees to + 30 degrees. Increasing the parasitic elements does not provide significant improvement in terms of the beam scanning where only additional 3 degrees to 5 degrees is achieved. In this work, with additional parasitic elements, the scanning from broadside is improved by with a novel approach where the ground plane reduction is applied. With the optimized switching locations at the parasitic elements, five measured directive beam patterns of 50 degrees, -30 degrees, 0 degrees, + 30 degrees, + 50 degrees can be obtained with the respective switching condition. An average gain of similar to 8 dBi can be obtained at all five measured directions. For all five sets of beam patterns, a common measured S-11 bandwidth from 5.696 GHz to 5.895 GHz can be achieved.