A Planar Ultrawideband Wide-Angle Scanning Array Loaded With Polarization-Sensitive Frequency-Selective Surface Structure

This article presents a fully planar ultrawideband wide-angle scanning tightly coupled array. A tightly coupled element, which has a low input resistance, is used as the basic array element. The element can be fed by a simple microstrip-to-coaxial transition, obviating the need for an additional impedance transform structure. To improve the scan performance of the array in both the E- and H-planes, a polarization-sensitive frequency-selective surface (FSS) structure, whose effective dielectric constant for the TM mode incidence wave and TE mode incidence wave can be changed, respectively, by different structural parameters, is designed to serve as the wide-angle impedance matching (WAIM) layer. The FSS structure is printed on the superstrate dielectric directly without an additional dielectric layer, resulting in a low-cost array. The proposed array can work in 3.7:1 bandwidth with voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) < 3 for E-plane scanning up to 75 degrees and H-plane scanning up to 60 degrees. Based on the designed unit cell, an 11 x 11 prototype is fabricated and measured. The measured results of the fabricated array show good agreement with simulations, proving the feasibility of the design.