Synthesis of the microstrip wire grid array

The wire grid or brickwall array structure presented was proposed by Kraus [1964] as a radio telescope antenna and the microstrip implementation of this array has been reported as having good impedance and gain bandwidth properties [Coetzee and Baker, 1996], with Conti and Toth [1980] and Conti et al. [1981] reporting a 8% bandwidth on a substrate of thickness 5% of the free space wavelength, and ourselves attaining 15% bandwidth on a small (13dB_i) array on a 10% high substrate. Some early work has been done on the microstrip wire grid array (MWGA), with a more recent full wave analysis by Hildebrand [1992]. The focus of this paper is an investigation of the radiation mechanism and a design procedure for the array. The localised nature of the radiation is shown by investigation of the fringing fields around the discontinuities and the proposed design procedure is based on considering the array to be a microstrip patch or dipole elements fed by microstrip lines