An Ellipse-Shaped Leaky-Wave Antenna Array for X-Band Aerial Landing System

Abstract

In this paper, an antenna array for the X-band aerial landing system has been proposed. The proposed antenna is an ellipse-shaped leakywave array radiating in slow mode wave and has a scanning range of 75° for different inter-element spacing. Four antenna arrays were designed: two with 60 elements and two with 30 elements each, all operating from 9.3 GHz to 12.3 GHz providing a gain of 30 dBi and 20 dBi, respectively. To verify the performance, a 15-element sub-array having an overall size of 210 mm × 30 mm and achieving a total gain of 17 dBi was fabricated and tested. The proposed sub-array was fabricated using Rogers Duroid5880 (<i>εr</i> = 2.2 and h = 1.575 mm). It has been shown through comparison of radiation patterns that measured and simulation results are in good agreement.