Wideband High-Gain Dual-Polarized Array Antenna With Bottom-Coupled Feeding Structure

A 32 × 32 dual-polarized high-gain high-efficiency antennaarray with an enhanced wide operating band applied in remote telemetrysystems is proposed. The basic element is composed of a cavity withstepped ridges and a bottom coupling feeding balun. By improving theprofile of the stepped ridge, wideband radiation and miniaturization arerealized. The balun is designed to coupling feed in a wideband andmakes the elements easy to mass integrate with the feeding network.Compact air-filled stripline networks (AFSNs) are used to feed the smallsize antenna elements and have the characteristics of low transmissionloss. The AFSN is finally fed by a double-layer ridge waveguide network(RWN). The complete array integrates the wideband miniaturized ele-ments and the feeding networks, achieving an operating band of 57.1%.An array prototype is designed and fabricated. The measured resultsshow that the operating bandwidth ranges from 10 to 18 GHz. Themeasured gain varies from 33.4 to 38.2 dBi. All physical apertures of thearray are radiation apertures, and the antenna efficiency reaches 57%,which proves that the proposed antenna effectively widens the bandwidthof the high-efficiency feeding network integrated array.