Finline Feeders Tapered Slot Antenna Design

Millimeter wave system has many distinct advantages such as miniaturizing system components, increasing frequency band width,providing higher detectability, uneasily influenced by atmosphere conditions, etc. This makes millimeter wave technique get the increasingly extensive application in radar, communications, electronic warfare, guidance, remote sensing, radiation survey, therefore the research of millimeter system is very vital for civil, the industry, national defense. As the millimeter wave energy radiation and the receiving device, the design and application of the antenna seem to be important, specially miniaturization and integration of the entire antenna system.In this dissertation, the performance of linearly tapered fin-fed slot antenna(LWSA) is discussed in theory, simulation and experiment. The radiation pattern characteristic influenced by changes of antenna's dielectric material, tapered shape and dimension is studied detailedly. Though the tapered slot antenna design is very important, a good waveguide-to-finline taper transitions is also needed because they could not thought over separately. The total system of linearly tapered fin-fed slot antenna, which is made up of radome, LWSA and the feed structure, was optimized by commercial software Ansoft HFSS.The antenna investigated in the dissertation is the unilateral slot antenna with fed taper and end taper, which is fed by fin-line. The antenna is obtained by extending the longitudinal strip of the fin-line, and etched on a metallized dielectric substrate. It is operating at Ka band (center frequency: 34GHz), which has a good agreement between simulated and measured results. Its E- and H-plane 3dB main lobe beamwidth are 79.25 and 80.03 degrees respectively with sidelobes less than -10dB. The antenna system has a good characteristic with wide symmetrical beamwidth, broad impedance bandwidth and compact structure.