| With the United States Navy's trend in recent years to field sleeker and stealthier ships in its fleet, ship designers have had to consider modifying their legacy ship designs to cut down on the overall radar cross section of the ship. While modifying a ship's overall shape can reduce the radar cross section, there's one factor that still contributes to RCS which isn't affected by changing the shape of the ship and that's the topside radiators, also known as its antennas. One of the dominant scatters of large RCS ships are its topside mounted antennas [1].;The intended result of this research effort was to develop a design for a low RCS replacement for the existing AN/SSR-1A antenna, designated as the AS-2815/SSR-1 antenna, currently used aboard U.S. Naval and Allied vessels. This new Ultra High Frequency antenna draws upon recent research results in various areas pertaining to microstrip patch antenna arrays, such as, parasitic coupling, gap coupling, utilization of stacked patches, utilization of layers of dielectrically diverse materials and array synthesis to meet the same requirements as the legacy AS-2815/SSR-1 antenna. Radome design techniques were employed to develop a radome that could meet requirements for the new antenna, as well as meeting the Navy's demands for adverse weather protection.;The antenna parameters for the new antenna design were validated through simulation and analysis using electromagnetic analysis software. The software used, SonnetRTM, employs an electromagnetic evaluation engine that utilizes a modified method of moments analysis that is based on Maxwell's equations and is capable of performing a complete three dimensional current evaluation on planar structures; thus evaluating the antenna and the radome housing. A MATLABRTM based program, POfacets, was then utilized to determine the RCS advantages for the new antenna over the legacy antenna. |
