A Wide-Angle and Fully Polarimetric Retrodirective Array Based on Tri-polarized Antennas with Pattern Complementation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation Vol. 70; no. 6; p. 1
• Main Authors: Wang, Yijue, Piao, Dazhi, Zuo, Jie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Antenna measurements; Antenna radiation patterns; Antennas; Dual polarization radar; Field of view; Incident waves; Linear antenna arrays; Microstrip; Microstrip antenna arrays; Microstrip antennas; monostatic radar cross section (RCS); Orthogonality; Planar structures; Polarimetry; Polarization; Radar cross sections; retrodirective array (RDA); Tri-polarized antenna; Van Atta array
• ISSN: 0018-926X; 1558-2221
• DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2022.3142370

A wide-angle and fully polarimetric Van Atta retrodirective array (RDA) based on tri-polarized antennas is proposed in this paper. By leveraging the pattern complementary and polarization orthogonality of three resonant modes including a TM02 monopole-like mode and two orthogonal TM11 microstrip patch modes, the RDA could better sense and retrodirect the incident wave with arbitrary polarization over a large field of view. A prototype of the RDA consisting of four tri-polarized antenna elements is designed and fabricated, which works at 5.8 GHz and has a low-profile planar structure with a compact volume of 1.93 × 0.56 × 0.059 λ03. The simulated and measured monostatic radar cross section (RCS) results show that, compared with the RDA composed of dual-polarized microstrip patches, this tri-polarized RDA has a significant improvement of the retrodictive angle range for the transverse-magnetic (TM) incident wave. Specifically, for the tri-polarized RDA, the -3 dB monostatic RCS beamwidth is 132°, and the -7 dB monostatic RCS beamwidth can reach 180°; while for the dual-polarized RDA, the -3 dB and -7 dB monostatic RCS beamwidth is only 52° and 73°, respectively.