Design of a Stacked Low-Profile Broadband Phased Array Antenna

A low-profile, wideband laminated microstrip patch antenna is proposed to solve the problem of narrow bandwidth of microstrip antennas. By adopting the laminated structure design, two resonance points appear in the passband of the antenna, and the operating bandwidth is expanded to 5.15 GHz to realize a larger bandwidth, and the relative bandwidth reaches 44.3 % to meet the broadband requirement. The maximum gain of 7 dBi is realized at 10.96 GHz, and the antenna exhibits excellent gain performance within 28.6 % relative bandwidth, which are all greater than 6 dBi, while the profile height is only 0.16 λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf>, which guarantees the low-profile characteristics. Based on this cell structure, the six-element one-dimensional array is further designed and its radiation characteristics are analyzed. The test results show that the array produces only 1.1 dB gain attenuation in the 0 deg - 45 deg scanning range, with an efficiency higher than 92 %. This design provides a new design solution for modern communication systems by realizing scanning stability while combining the advantages of low profile and light weight.