Slot-array antennas with shaped radiation patterns and a method for the design thereof

摘要

An irregular arrangement of slots in a cylindrical slot-array antenna is used to control the radiation pattern, achieving a variation of gain and/or beam tilt with azimuth. A design methodology for slot-array antennas achieves efficient and rapid optimization by minimizing the number of degrees of freedom and the number of significant mutual-coupling interactions. A useful range of designs is achieved by requiring that the slots are arranged in bays and that all slots, and their probes, are identical. Bays are separated by approximately a wavelength and, therefore, mutual coupling between bays can be ignored. Although the antenna slots are physically grouped into bays, the analytical approach groups the slots into paths defined by a simultaneous variation in z and 0 coordinates of the slots.