Design of High Gain Microstrip Array Antenna and Beam Steering for X Band RADAR Application

In this paper high gain microstrip array antennas have been designed and analyzed for X band RADAR application. The array elements are excited by using inset feeding technique. Interestingly, all the array antennas are tuned exactly at centre operating frequency of 10 GHz. Rogers RT/duroid 5880 (TM) having relative permittivity of 2.2 has been used as substrate for all the array antennas. The results show that the studied antenna array attained an operating band ranging from 9.77 GHz - 10.15 GHz with a bandwidth 380 MHz. It also revealed that the proposed 2x4 element array achieved a peak gain of 15.5 dB, a directivity of 15.82 dBi and a return loss of - 30.27 dB. A beam steering of (theta, phi) = (16 degrees, 0) with half power beam width (HPBW) of 16.88 degrees is achieved using switched line phase shifter for 1x4 elements array antenna. Beam steering antenna shows return loss of -33.28 dB, very good VSWR of 1.04 and high bandwidth of 880 MHz. The ANSYS high frequency structural simulator (HFSS) has been used to perform all the simulations works. Contribution - A 2x4 elements microstrip array antenna and a 1x4 elements beam steering array antenna have been proposed for X band RADAR application.