A wide-angle scanning planar phased array with pattern-reconfigurable windmill-shaped loop elements has been designed. Each element has a four-port windmill-shaped structure over a high-impedance surface, and it can steer the main beam in four different space quadrants by exciting one port at a time. A 16-element planar ( 4×4 ) array is fabricated and measured to demonstrate the wide-angle scanning performance of the array. The results show that the fabricated array is able to scan its main beam up to 72° and supports a 3-dB scanning coverage up to 92° in each quadrant. In addition, input amplitudes and phases for the array are optimized with a hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm to enhance the array scanning performance.
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