The active planar array antenna offers a number of advantages, including use as a portable antenna for easy reception of direct Ku-band satellite television broadcasts. This paper presents a newly developed active planar array antenna which provides electronic beam-tracking without mechanical tracking equipment. The features of the antenna are: (1) use of a series-parallel fed microstrip array, (2) electromagnetically excited array by a coplanar patch connected to the coplanar waveguide, and (3) low noise down-converters and self-phasing units incorporated into the feed circuits for electronic beam-tracking. The paper discusses the design of the coplanar waveguide fed coplanar patch and the configuration of a self-phasing active planar array antenna. The measured gain of the experimental 9-element unit array antenna without active devices is 13.4 dBi at 11.85 GHz. Experimental results for a 216-element self-steering planar array of size 147/spl times/220.5 mm are also presented.
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