Comparative Study of Radiation Performance Between Two Ultra Wide Band Planar Patch Array Antennas for Weather Radar Applications in C-Band

This paper presents a comparative study of radiation performance between two Ultra Wide Band (UWB) microstrip planar array antennas for weather RADAR applications which operate in C band. These arrays are etched onto a FR4 printed circuit board with an overall size of (162 x 100 x 1.58) mm(3) and dielectric constant epsilon(r) = 4.4. The proposed arrays antennas are composed of a twenty radiating patch element with a T-junction power divider which has a role to divide the power equally to all antenna elements above a partial ground plane. Simulation results show that each array antennas has its own characteristics. The results show that the use of an array antennas with rectangular radiating elements give a bandwidth which is about 118 %, gain and high directivity can exceed 12 dB and a half power beam width of 10 degrees, which are relatively closer to those obtained in array antennas with circular radiating elements.