Design of a 256-Element, UHF-C Band, Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna Array for Airborne Applications

The Advanced Aperture Solutions team at L3Harris Technologies presents a 256-element, dual-polarized, UHF-C band, Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna (AVA) array. This multi-octave aperture was designed to achieve scanning ±60° boresight. Additionally, each AVA element was designed with a co-incident phase center for implementation in polarization-diverse applications, although the emphasis is on horizontal and vertical polarization performance in this paper. The fabricated array is connected to a true time delay beamformer to demonstrate beam-steering performance over a wide frequency range. Array patterns are measured using a spherical near-field range, and results are shown to closely resemble simulated performance.