The present invention relates to a wave-guide-notch antenna and more particularly a dually polarised wave-guide-notch antenna.
When designing electrically steerable antennas (ESA) one strives for at least some of the following properties: low-weight, broad-band, dual polarisation, low losses, wide coverage, adequate packaging and a construction simple to manufacture as well as at low cost.
Balanced antenna elements such as the radiating portion of a notch element possesses excellent bandwidth properties, but are cumbersome to realise, e.g. to manufacture. One reason for this is that at least one transmission line per element needs to cross the ground plane, implying a feed through and possibly a contact.
The situation becomes even more complex when the possibility to switch between different polarisation states (e.g. linear and circular) is required.
A convenient way of feeding antenna elements above a ground plane is excitation by means of slots in the ground plane. This removes the need for a feed through or a contact
If wave-guide elements are to be tightly packaged and slot-fed with satisfactory results, see
Efficient antenna element design requires that the element volume be split at well-defined interfaces into several smaller volumes that can be optimised at a significantly lesser effort. However, a split interface in a protruding ridge/notch region of the antenna element implies boundary conditions not implemented in EM analysis software of today. On the other hand, a split interface in a wave-guide can be simulated with high accuracy.
Standard ridged wave-guide feeds do not easily fit into standard lowcost industrial manufacturing methods, while probe or stripline fed slots do, as doses a probe fed ridge.
A U.S. Pat. No. 6,577,207 from Jun. 10, 2003 discloses a dual-band electromagnetic coupler, which uses a ridged square wave-guide section to couple a square port of a mode converter to a common square port. The ridged square wave-guide section includes ridges and phase shifters which delay components of the high-band modes to produce a TE1,0 and a TE0,1 mode at the common port in both bands.
Another U.S. Pat. No. 6,552,691 from Apr. 22, 2003 discloses a broadband dual polarised micro-strip notch antenna. The phased array antennas includes two planar micro-strip notch elements that interlock and are perpendicular to each other having their phase centres coincident providing advantageous operational characteristics for forming wide bandwidth and wide scan angle.
Still another European patent EP0831550 discloses an antenna element consisting of a micro-strip section mounted at right angles to a support leaving a gap between the micro-strip section and the edge of the support. A notch starts from the free micro-strip edge. This has a wide section narrowing to a second narrower section. The notch dimensions provide a fixed phase centre in a narrow band of around 10% of desired centre frequency.
However these documents are considered to only constitute the state of the art and in any way not anticipating the present application.
Therefore there is still a wish to in a simple way obtain the properties desired to simultaneously achieve the requirements mentioned above and a solution for such a dually polarised wave-guide-notch antenna is here suggested by the present invention.
A dual polarised wave-guide notch antenna array is disclosed. The device comprises of a feed section, consisting of either strip-line transmission lines or longitudinally oriented probes, a feed/wave-guide interface that enables controlled energy transfer between the feed section and the wave-guide section, a wave-guide section with ridges, transferring energy between the interface and a tapered notch-section, in which the electromagnetic field is gradually adjusted towards free-space conditions.
The device is set forth by the independent claim 1 and further embodiments are set forth by the dependent claims 2 to 6.
The invention, together with further objects and advantages thereof, may be best understood by making reference to the following description taken together with the accompanying drawings, in which:
a illustrates a strip-line section containing a slot;
b illustrates a probe section with an underlying strip-line section;
An embodiment of the invention consists of a feed section 1 constituting a strip-line section or a probe section, where two (or more) input transmission lines 2 and/or probes 6 are arranged so that e.g. one linear and one circular polarization is transmitted (or received) depending on how the input transmission lines 2 are excited. The feed section 1 transfers the strip-line wave or the probe wave to a wave-guide mode (and vice versa), of a ridged wave-guide section 3, a feed/wave-guide interface 5, e.g. in the form of crossed slots. The wave-guide mode finally enters the tapered notch section 7, which due to its TEM character gradually adjusts the field towards free-space conditions (Z0≈377 ohms) outside the antenna. (Also see
Thus, a feed section 1 may consist of a strip-line section with at least one hybrid feeding the crossed-slot feed/wave-guide interface 5 aperture. In another embodiment the feed section is realized using longitudinal probes 6 feeding a general feed/wave-guide interface 5 aperture, including crossed-slot apertures. Still an underlying strip-line section may feed the longitudinal probes.
The ridged hollow wave-guide section 3 may be of arbitrary length and it may also conceptually be omitted and replaced only by a wave-guide like the ridged wave-guide section 7a. The wave-guide section 3 is generally realized with adjoining wave-guide walls, thus creating a self-supporting wave-guide or can be made with isolated wall segments that need to be assembled individually, or using no wave-guide walls at all, but only presenting the tapered ridges 13.
The feed section 1 with or without a probe section is positioned underneath the wave-guide section 3. The probe section can have an underlying strip line section that may constitute one or more hybrids and the output of the feed section is generally two signals, either in phase (linear polarization) or in quadrature (circular polarization). This functionality may also be included in a T/R module 9.
If needed, the T/R module 9 and the feed section 1 or the probe section may be displaced relative to the slot layer and wave-guide section 3.
a illustrates schematically seen from the side a feed section constituting a strip-line section feeding a slot 8 and
In
In
As an example of the zero length wave-guide section the footprints of the ridges and tapered wave-guide walls are depicted in
The present invention designates convenient feeding techniques (strip-line fed slots, probe-fed slots or, more generally a probe-fed aperture in the feed/wave-guide interface) to a doubly polarised and broadband radiating aperture consisting of an optional wave-guide section and a tapered notch section. The presence of a wave-guide section facilitates analysis as well as it offers the possibility of a self-supporting radiating element grid. Such a grid offers small, manufacturing-originated tolerances, rather than high, assembly-originated tolerances. In particular no probes through the ground plane (wave-guide bottom) are needed, facilitating a simple mount technique of an electrically high performance scanned antenna array (ESA).
It will be understood by those skilled in the art that various modifications and changes could be made to the present invention without departure from the spirit and scope thereof, which is defined by the appended claims.
Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind | 371c Date |
---|---|---|---|---|
PCT/SE2004/001207 | 8/18/2004 | WO | 00 | 7/30/2007 |
Publishing Document | Publishing Date | Country | Kind |
---|---|---|---|
WO2006/019339 | 2/23/2006 | WO | A |
Number | Name | Date | Kind |
---|---|---|---|
5227808 | Davis | Jul 1993 | A |
6133888 | Mohuchy | Oct 2000 | A |
6552691 | Mohuchy | Apr 2003 | B2 |
6577207 | Volman | Jun 2003 | B2 |
6842154 | Apostolos | Jan 2005 | B1 |
20040004580 | Toland | Jan 2004 | A1 |
Number | Date | Country |
---|---|---|
0831550 | Mar 1998 | EP |
Number | Date | Country | |
---|---|---|---|
20070296639 A1 | Dec 2007 | US |