Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna Arrays Fed by Substrate Integrated Waveguide Right-Angled Power Dividers

Abstract

This paper describes a novel feed system for compact antipodal Vivaldi antenna arrays on a single layer of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) by using SIW H-plane right-angled power dividers. The proposed antenna systems are composed of a Vivaldi array and an H-plane right-angled corner power divider which includes an over-moded waveguide section. Based on the number of antennas in the Vivaldi array, mode converter sections at K-band and Ka-band frequencies are designed, fabricated, and measured when feeding Vivaldi antenna arrays with two, three, and four antennas. Right-angled SIW power dividers are employed to obtain controllable phase distribution over the output ports which consequently controls the beam shapes of the systems. The phase relationships in the output ports are varied to obtain different pattern directions for different applications. The two-way divider system with 180-degree phase difference and three-way divider system are fabricated and measured; simulation results are presented for other designs. The measured results are in good agreement with simulations which confirms the design approach. All systems achieve good performance and meet all design goals including a return loss better than 10 dB in the operating bandwidth, gain higher than 8 dB for all systems, and radiation and polarization efficiencies higher than 80% and 98%, respectively.