A Broad Angular Coverage and Large Bandwidth Antenna

An antenna with several beams which could be electronically selected is described. In azimuth a large angular sector is covered and could be extended to 360 degrees. The antenna is composed of several arrays of flat dipoles located on a printed circuit which is wrapped around a cylindrical special dielectric lens. The passive antenna operates between 8 and 16 GHz in an angular sector of 100 degrees. In the frequency band, the mean quadratic error between the theoretical and experimental beam angular positions for the whole arrays is lower than one degree. Accurate angular measurements can be obtained by means of sum and difference patterns related to adjacent arrays. The antenna efficiency is about fifty percent in the frequency range.