Nonreciprocal and magnetically scanned miniaturized leaky-wave antennas using coupled transmission lines

Abstract

This paper presents a new class of magnetically scanned leaky wave antennas (LWAs), incorporating ferrite (or possibly magnetoelectric composite), for wide angle beamsteering. Using the ferrite’s tunable permeability beamsteering is achieved by controlling the external bias field. This is unlike most leaky-wave antennas requiring frequency modulation to steer the beam. Our first design is based on coupled microstrip lines on a biased ferrite substrate with nonreciprocal radiation properties, specifically a 5 dB contrast between the measured transmit and receive gain in the E-plane was achieved. However, it was found that inhomogeneities in the bias field limited its scanning performance. To alleviate this issue, a new class of miniaturized metamaterial based LWA was considered and presented here. This new design is based on coupled composite right left handed (CRLH) transmission lines (TLs) and has a unit-cell length of only λ0/20. For validation, a 15-unit-cell prototype was manufactured and its TX/RX beams were scanned in the E-plane 80° by changing the bias field within a range of ±50 Oe. We found that the associated antenna gain varied between 3.5 dB and 5 dB at 1.79 GHz as the beam was scanned. In the above design, scanning was realized by changing the distance between the bias source and the LWA. Thus, future work will be focused on LWAs tuned by biasing a magnetodielectric layer placed below the ferrite substrate.