Light weight high performance microstrip antenna array for manportable radars

The paper describes the design realisation of a 512 (32 × 16) element microstrip antenna array in X-band, offering high performance features applicable to manportable search radars. The new planar array configuration realised, utilises optimised inset fed square patch elements distributed on a small size aperture, with a low loss multilayer hybrid corporate feed network designed for a low sidelobe Taylor´s amplitude distribution. The novel microstrip antenna array, designed, fabricated in numbers and tested, has offered a fairly wide bandwidth (4%) in X-band, a high gain (> 30 dB) with a good return loss (< -15 dB) and low sidelobe (< -25 dB) pattern performance through the bandwidth, and weighs only 1.2 kg with its back-up structure.