A wideband microstrip patch array for a MicroSAR

In order to realize their full potential, future spaceborne, Earth-surveillance, synthetic aperture radars (SARs) will require better antennas than their predecessors; while the steering requirements remain sensibly unaltered, greater fractional bandwidth will often be essential and dual-linear polarization will become a highly desirable feature. Antennas that can meet these anticipated future needs are usually planar phased arrays and potential designs have been reported in the open literature. While the technical efficacy of these reported designs is not in question, it is not clear that antennas based on these designs would be inexpensive to manufacture. This paper describes the work that was done to produce an active antenna that meets the technical needs of future SARs but is relatively inexpensive to manufacture. Finally, it describes such an antenna that has been designed, constructed and tested, and is to be incorporated into a SAR airborne demonstrator.